Native Intelligence

As a British journalist based in Los Angeles, Ivor Davis reported in detail on the August, 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and four others at her Cielo Drive home in Benedict Canyon -- and the strange era that began when authorities arrested a repeat criminal named Charles Manson for masterminding the crimes.

Davis wrote his first book about Manson and his followers, "Five to Die: The Book That Helped Convict Manson," in 1970 and covered the legal proceedings that led to Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, Tex Watson, Linda Kasabian and others becoming notorious household names.

Davis' new book, Manson Exposed: A Reporter's 50-Year Journey into Madness and Murder," revisits the era and some of its key figures, including lead prosecutors Vince Bugliosi and Aaron Stovitz and the Los Angeles reporters who covered the Manson family and the legal case.

In this chapter, Davis recounts battles between the DA's office and top Los Angeles journalists who competed to get to Manson and to break news on the case.

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"People say I'm an extremely opinionated person. If opinionated means that when I think I'm right I try to shove it down everyone's throat, they're correct. As for arrogant, I'm arrogant and I'm kind of caustic. The great majority of people I deal with are hopelessly incompetent, so there's an air of superiority about me."
--Vince Bugliosi, Playboy

For nearly a year, I trotted along and took my front-row seat at the trial. It was unlike any I have ever covered, and it provided wildly unpredictable, bizarre behavior by the defendants and another group of people who, like me, were writing and reporting on the trial. I am talking about those ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate--the press, the supposedly unbiased third wheel in this legal circus, who had no official role other than to report on what was being played out daily. We were simply present as unbiased onlookers, to efficiently, accurately, and effectively record what took place in front of judge and jury as well as outside the courtroom.

But in this particular case, with Bugliosi using every trick in the book to send "the diabolical dictator and his mindless but bloodthirsty zombies" to the gas chamber, some members of the press forgot their role as silent watchers and became inextricably entwined --sometimes in the most alarming and unimaginable fashions. Allow me to chronicle some of the many ways they impinged upon events surrounding the trial from the very beginning, often with chilling side effects.

To start with, when stories of the murder first broke in early August 1969, headline writers had a field day. The victims were no mere ordinary souls but high-profile personalities; and as a result, early accounts produced a slew of largely irresponsible suppositions, citing everything from drug orgies to black magic and voodoo as being responsible for the carnage.

Even the stately Life magazine, a month after the Cielo massacre, gave grieving widower Roman Polanski a chance to provide a fully illustrated guided tour of the blood-stained house. And in December, when the LAPD named the suspects, before you could say Tate-LaBianca, the confession of Susan Atkins -- based on an interview she had given to her lawyers -- was spread-eagled all over the front page of the Los Angeles Times. The paper paid $5,000 -- big money back then -- to entrepreneurial photojournalist Larry Schiller, for permission to run the story.

Fast-forward to a month before the eagerly awaited trial was to begin; an issue of Rolling Stone carried a nearly book-sized 30,000-word story about Manson titled "The Most Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive." That article eventually led to career changes for two individuals -- namely Stovitz and Bugliosi. For Stovitz, it was the precursor to the death knell of his role as the district attorney's chief trial prosecutor; for Bugliosi, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

But the press wasn't finished stirring the pot. On October 9, 1970, William Farr, a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, reported that authorities knew that the chief architect of the Tate-La Bianca killings had also compiled a celebrity death list. The story headlined, "Liz, Sinatra on Slay List--Tate Witness" was splashed on the front page. Leaked from grand jury testimony of Susan Atkins' Sybil Brand cellmates, it made for pretty sensational and gory reading, spelling out in great detail the fate that awaited the celebrities. Among the revelations: Elizabeth Taylor's famous violet eyes were to be removed and mailed to her ex-husband Richard Burton. Castration was to be his fate. Ol' Blue Eyes Frank Sinatra was to be skinned alive while hanging from a meat hook. Welsh heartthrob Tom Jones was to have his throat cut while engaged in sexual intercourse with Susan Atkins -- at knifepoint, if necessary. And Steve McQueen was cited as well, though the exact manner of his liquidation was not spelled out by Atkins; she did tell Graham that she felt the superstar was getting "too politically inclined," which went "against her grain." Whatever that meant.

Farr received the information in transcripts surreptitiously passed to him by one of two lawyers. And no one knew which one of the two it was. Suspicion pointed to Bugliosi or [defense lawyer] Daye Shinn. When the judge asked Farr to reveal his source, he refused, citing California's shield law that safeguards the right of journalists to protect their sources. Not surprising, the prosecution pointed the finger at the defense, which in turn blamed the prosecution. The case dragged on, and eventually Farr paid for his exclusive by serving forty-six days in jail. Bugliosi and Shinn were indicted by a Grand Jury, but eventually a judge dismissed the case against the two.

Bugliosi claimed he was not happy with Farr, but he reserved special ire for Mary Neiswender, a veteran police-beat writer who was covering the trial for the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Neiswender had become the envy of the press corps for one reason and one reason only -- throughout the trial she had acquired unbelievable access to Manson. (She later wrote about it in her 2012 memoir, "Assassins...Serial Killers...Corrupt Cops--Chasing the News in a Skirt and High Heels.")

Week after week throughout the trial, there appeared under Neiswender's byline exclusive interviews with Manson. When I spoke to her in 2019, she recalled her one-on-one talks with the man at the heart of the murder. She was the only reporter to have access to him while the trial was playing out. Other trial reporters -- jealous of her unfettered access -- reckoned that once again Manson had gained control over a woman and was feeding her only what he felt would benefit him.

"I thought Charlie hated women," she told me. "So why did he choose me? How did it happen? I maneuvered a way to get a phone call to him through a lowlife Mob friend who had worked for the Teamsters Union in Long Beach Harbor and who had met him in the prison law library -- Charlie was planning to go proper and be his own lawyer." She said her longshoreman pal called her on the phone while in the library, and "then he handed the phone to Charlie, who, he told me, had slithered under a table. We started talking. I had Charlie all to myself." She insisted she was never his propaganda machine, though he likely had some Machiavellian reason for talking with her. Perhaps for "media relations."

"I tried to keep him away from the rest of the press," she said. "All the major network big names in the TV news divisions as well as newspapers and magazines had written asking for interviews. He asked me, 'Do you think I should do this one, or that one?' And I would say, 'Oh, hell no, Charlie.' I kept the whole press away from him. I said, 'Tom Brokaw is going to put you in a pressure cooker...and you don't need that.' I knew he was insecure, and I used his insecurity against him. I guess that was a switch for someone like Charlie." But along the way, she insisted, "I wasn't about to give my soul away. And I never did."
She began to visit him regularly in prison. "Charlie set it up so I was listed as a 'friend' with no police record. And as Manson didn't have many friends without a police record, I was home and dry." Later on, she said, when her stories became more trial oriented and upset those in the district attorney's office, he suggested she change her designation from "friend" to "witness."

It was an uphill battle, Neiswender recalled. "I had to fight first with his jailers and later with the judges to make that 'witness' designation stick. They knew I wasn't a witness, but it was just a way around the system."

The "witness" said she got to know him very well. "We never shook hands or anything like that. Charlie was clever, street-wise, and charismatic. He knew how to get around people. Despite stories to the contrary, Charlie couldn't stop a clock with his eyes or make you shrivel up and die, although he tried." But she never ever underestimated him, or ever forgot who he was and what he did. She said that frequently, when Manson telephoned her, if she wasn't in the office, her editors would automatically put his calls through to her home in Rolling Hills. Her children came to answer the phone and yell, "Hey, Mom...it's Charlie." She insisted he didn't have her home phone number, "But he did know where I lived because a few months later three Manson Family members unexpectedly dropped by, told my young son who was in the house alone that they had been sent by Charlie, and then asked him for a box of matches. I was furious and I called Charlie and said, 'You sonafabitch.' He promised me it would never happen again." When he couldn't reach her on the phone, he'd send her handwritten notes. "His handwriting was middle-school, but his vocabulary was that of a college graduate. Don't forget -- he had a doctorate in street smarts and manipulation."

In a strange way, those calls and letters brought her closer to Manson, she said. "Most of the time, Charlie made a lot of sense. He said, 'Here are twelve lyin' jurors who all say they never heard of me or Sharon Tate or the murders -- you believe that? They've made up their mind. I'm the one they're going to send to the gas chamber; with my long hair I'm a perfect scapegoat.'"

He carefully massaged the scapegoat scenario, repeatedly stressing that not only didn't he murder anyone, he didn't force kids into dope -- just the opposite. "If they let me go," he told her, "I'm still trouble because I could turn into a monster. They've given me the weapon of fear. Everyone's afraid of me." During those tête-à-têtes, she said, "I noticed how carefully he would watch my face to see how far he could push. When he felt he had pushed the line, he would break into his little-kid smile."

During the trial, Neiswender wrote a series of "exclusive" stories based on her interviews. "Manson's Conscience Clear" was one; another, titled "Forces that Shaped Manson," focused on his unhappy childhood and his prostitute mother's abandonment of him. The stories had changed from her earlier ones, which had headlines that screamed, "Wolf Gang Pack of Thrill Killers." She was later to observe, "One-on-one, he was okay, but in court he was a totally different guy -- a performer."

While the rest of us in the press corps were being regularly scooped by Neiswender, Bugliosi was absolutely furious about Manson using a reporter as his private conduit. "Vince despised me -- he hated me until he died," she told me. "It had started when I first got onto the case and did stories on the judges and the attorneys -- anyone who could help me. I had already made friends with the judge. It's the way I operate, and it worked for me. I wrote a story about Vince. And then Aaron [Stovitz]. I called Vince a 'near genius.' It was a very flattering story. But my big mistake was when I described him as the 'balding prosecutor.' It was like a bomb went off."

Later, Neiswender recalled that he summoned her and Linda Deutsch of the Associated Press, who was getting her very first taste of big trial coverage and at first assumed the lunacy she was witnessing was normal procedure, into his office. "He lived in that office the entire trial, and he said, 'If you don't straighten out and do what I say, I will release an article I've written for Life magazine.' I didn't know what that meant, but what upset me more was his foul language. He was treating me like a naughty child. He kept accusing me of being anti-cop. What with that and his swearing, I'd had it. 'You jackass, I've got the words "cop lover" tattooed on my ass,' I screamed at him. From then on, we never even said hello for the rest of the trial. Whenever he saw me coming he would cut off the conversation. I didn't need him -- I was on good terms with Aaron. He was easy to get along with -- he even came to our press parties, which we held at what we called 'trial central': room 905 at the Hilton Hotel where reporter Theo Wilson based herself."

One evening during the trial, Neiswender remembered that Bugliosi surprised everyone by showing up at a media party where guests were instructed to, 'come dressed as your favorite Manson Family member.' Several reporters came as Linda Kasabian or Mary Brunner with crosses painted on their foreheads. A crudely written sign posted on the wall at the party read, "I'm the devil...here to do the devil's work," which was the phrase Watson purportedly delivered shortly after arriving at the Cielo Drive house.

"Vince didn't stay long," recalled Neiswender, "Ron Hughes stayed until the end."

Realizing that getting too close to the press was a slippery slope, Bugliosi opted mostly to keep his distance, although other reporters frequently heard from him indirectly when their editors called them with a reprimand from the chief prosecutor. He religiously monitored the local papers and his personal clips. His sister meticulously clipped every article that mentioned her famous brother, and she would alert him of any negative press. If he was displeased, as he often was, he would call the journalist's editor to harangue or complain about the coverage. On one occasion, Theo Wilson and Sandi Gibbons, the reporter for the local City News Service, were confronted by Bugliosi. "Vince apologized -- sort of," recalled Gibbons. "He said when he called a female reporter 'a cocksucker' he was referring only to Neiswender. 'I didn't mean you girls,' he said."

A day later, a newspaper colleague, so aggrieved by Bugliosi's language, complained to DA Joe Busch, noting that Neiswender was a good Catholic mother of two, who was outraged at such foul language. Busch ordered Bugliosi to publicly apologize, recalled Linda Deutsch. "Vince bit his tongue and said something like, 'Mary you know I've been under a lot of stress.' It was all about Vince." Another time Deutsch and Gibbons were amazed when the smiling prosecutor waxed on endlessly about how happy he was with their coverage. The two women reported back to gathered media: "Pope Vincent the Last has just blessed us."

But mostly we saw the dark, serious, and severe side to Bugliosi, although I know he worked hard to impress the press. "Vince had one technique he always used with the press," his deputy Stephen Kay recalled. "He didn't care what the press asked him because when he left the court every night, he walked over to where the cameras were. He ignored their questions but delivered just one sound bite. He told me he had learned the sound bite by heart the night before, having practiced it in front of a mirror. At the time I thought, 'Why waste your time practicing a sound bite?'"

Kay, who had completely the opposite attitude with the press, later told me that Bugliosi disliked women reporters more than their male counterparts. He lumped them all under the derogatory label of "sob sisters," and complained bitterly that the reporters wrote sympathetic stories about the Manson girls who camped out in front of the Hall of Justice.
"One time, I was kind of crouched down to talk inside the railing and the lady reporters were sitting in the front row. Vince turned to me and said, 'Don't ever let me catch you kneeling to those whores again.'" And on one occasion in court, Bugliosi almost got into fisticuffs with Susan Atkins. She was being dragged out of the court for repeatedly interrupting the proceedings and made a sudden grab for Bugliosi's papers. He reacted by grabbing the documents with one hand and swinging at her with the other. He missed.

My own experience with him was a strange one. We were pleasant to each other during the trial, although I knew he was resentful of the media. In 1976 he ran for district attorney opposite incumbent John Van De Kamp, who, much to Bugliosi's chagrin, had been appointed to the job after Joe Busch died. That year I had written a long profile on Bugliosi for Los Angeles magazine. It was relatively pro Van De Kamp, the rich and efficient, but dull white-bread candidate compared to the flashy, live-wire, shoot-from-the-hip Bugliosi in his three-piece Brooks Brothers suits, still riding high on his Manson triumph. Van De Kamp's team was doing as much as it could to jazz up his image and put a little pep in the step of the man who had been given the job after Busch's death. Everyone knew Bugliosi's name, yet he was still the outsider -- a bit of a wild card. My magazine piece chronicled two incidents in his life: I labeled them "The Milkman Case" and "The Cardwell Affair."
Leading the anti-Bugliosi charge was George Denny, an affable Beverly Hills lawyer who insisted he, too, was a serious candidate for the office, but really wasn't.

Denny was more a hatchet man and distraction, who wanted to take Bugliosi down; he continually insisted that Bugliosi was "unfit for office." I later learned that Denny might have had a hidden agenda. He was Irving Kanarek's personal lawyer and good friend; although, having watched Kanarek in action, I couldn't see how he endeared himself to too many of his colleagues. Denny was apparently also somewhat aggrieved after hearing how Bugliosi had treated opposing counsel in court, and particularly after those covering the trial gleefully reported that Bugliosi once publicly described Kanarek as "The Toscanini of Tedium" -- a devastatingly accurate phrase that you just knew Vincent had pondered long and hard to create. Denny's version of the milkman story was this: Bugliosi had used the power of the DA's office to hound his former milkman, one Herbert Wiesel, because he suspected that Wiesel had fathered Bugliosi's son! Wiesel sued Bugliosi for slander, and the case was settled out of court. Denny represented the milkman and told me at the time: "Bugliosi came to my office and handed me $12,000 in $100 bills as part of the settlement and later delivered an additional $500. Denny said part of the liquidated damages clause stated that anyone revealing the total amount of the settlement publicly could be penalized to the tune of $15,000. Nonetheless, he announced the terms of the settlement at a press conference, openly inviting Bugliosi to bring damages. Bugliosi's version of the story was that at the time he believed the milkman had stolen $300 from his home, so he quite legitimately used the DA's investigators to try to confirm the fact.

The other black eye that was inflicted on Bugliosi occurred in June 1973. A Santa Monica divorcee, Virginia Cardwell, claimed that she was having an affair with Bugliosi. She further asserted that he gave her $448 to have an abortion, and when he found out she had not had the abortion, he exploded and violently attacked her. She reported the attack to Santa Monica Police, but later withdrew her complaint, telling police she had hired Bugliosi to obtain her tardy alimony payments and that her injuries had been caused by her small son wielding a baseball bat. Again, there was an out-of-court settlement, noted Denny, in which Bugliosi paid Cardwell. All along, Bugliosi claimed his relationship with Cardwell was strictly lawyer-client.

"It's not that Bugliosi is not a good lawyer, or a hardworking and skilled trial lawyer, but to me one of the most terrifying things you can conjure up in government is a prosecutor who misuses his power," said Denny. "That's why I took him on before. There are many talented people who have a flaw in their character. His flaw happens to be a massive ego and an inability to tell the truth, as I've experienced it in these two cases. With those credentials a person ought not to become District Attorney."

Bugliosi, who invited me to his home to meet his wife Gail (they had two young children, Wendy and Vince Jr.) and rebut all allegations, told me: "I'm not going to dignify those charges by a comment. If I did these things, my wife of twenty years would not be living with me."

Bugliosi relished the idea of painting himself as the rebel and the outsider, in direct contrast to the establishment Van De Kamp. He suggested I talk to a couple of high-profile supporters -- his tennis pals, actor Robert Conrad and comedian Bill Cosby, with whom he regularly played at Hugh Hefner's Holmby Hills Playboy mansion. His campaign also had the support of the DA's veteran prosecutor J. Miller Leavy, who had approved him being brought aboard for the Manson trial. "Vince may come across tough and aloof," said his campaign manager Harvey Englander, "but a few TV spots will show him as a warm, nice guy -- a fellow who cares much about his wife and family and wants to make your home as safe as his."

At several political rallies I attended, Bugliosi was introduced to wild applause as "the man who got Manson." Ironically, when the race was in full throttle, I spoke to Stephen Kay, who said he was supporting Van De Kamp. Bugliosi lost. Not long afterwards, I met him at a conference of TV critics in Beverly Hills, where Vince was a panelist with George DiCenzo, who played Bugliosi in NBC's 1976 miniseries based on "Helter Skelter." ("Every day Vince came to the set, takes me aside and tells me how I should play him," DiCenzo laughed.)

On the film set Vince and I shook hands. "Do you still hate me?" he asked.

The answer was no, of course I didn't hate him. But I must confess to thinking that his sad question clearly showed that for all his bluster and ego, deep down inside he still had a mile-long streak of insecurity, and that, until his dying day, he would never be able to shake it off, despite his phenomenal success in court and acclaim as an author.

Davis' book is available at his website.

Posted by Visiting Blogger at 8:34 PM | Permalink

Part of the front page of the Los Angeles Star published on Oct. 9, 1858.

By Susan LaTempa

It feels to a lot of readers--and journalists--that we've lived through unusually turbulent times at Los Angeles newspapers in recent years, with the shape-shifting but ever-beset L.A. Times typically at the center of the story.

But if you step back for an historic perspective, you'll find that 'twas ever thus for L.A. journalism--and then some.

From their start in the early 1850s, local newspapers--and/or their owners, publishers, and editors--came and went as frequently as other get-ahead schemes. Newspapers were aligned with political parties. Editors ran for office, castigated their competitors in print, and sought printing business from government agencies.

As editor for "Paperback L.A.," the "casual anthology" series from Prospect Park Books, I've been poking around the increasingly accessible archives of early Los Angeles newspapers, including The Star/La Estrella and The Los Angeles Daily Herald, from which I drew excerpts for the books. I'm not a historian, but I've been a newspaper and magazine staff writer and editor, so I read those old columns of newsprint with sympathy and, it turns out, some envy.

If you ask me, L.A.'s first fifty years of newspapering, before yellow journalism was even invented, were way more colorful than its last fifty years.

Editors Put the Passion in Passionate

For example, I've seen nothing in modern times like the exchange of invective in print that led to a gun battle in the streets, which happened in 1879 between Joseph Lynch, editor of the Herald, and William Spaulding, acting editor of the Evening Express. The issue was the influence of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company on politics; Lynch had described Spaulding as a "pismire," or ant, "of a dog-like and snarling temper." Spaulding later wrote that both of them missed all their shots. "As I continued to fire, I advanced, and when the fracas was over, I was standing in the middle of the street, and he was in the barber shop." The feud didn't go on forever: Their newspapers were merged by Hearst in 1931.

You Think You Have a Communications Problem?

The 1850s and '60s were get-a-foothold time for journalists in our small town surrounded by cattle ranches and vineyards, isolated, until 1860, by the lack of telegraph communications. There was little local news except for crime and vigilante reports. Newsgathering tactics included getting your buddies to write letters from their camping trips and scissoring news out of other papers. San Francisco and East Coast publications were happy to exchange issues for reciprocal re-use, but, according to an early Star editor, news took "from two to six weeks and in one instance fifty-two days" to arrive.

Tech Revolution

Things had improved with the arrival of the telegraph, but what's that notice on Page 2 of the first issue of the new Daily Herald? (Page 2 carried the breaking news, with the pride of place on Page 1 going to poetry and advertisements.) It seems that editor/publisher Charles A. Storke wasn't having a good day: The (actual) wires were down, and there was no news.

Poetry Was Actually Popular

Poetry and politics were the pillars of editorial content in L.A.'s early newspapers. Various papers actively advocated for Whigs, Democrats (and their subgroups, including Copperheads and Chivalry Democrats), even those pesky pro-abolition Republicans--but poetry was something everyone could appreciate. It held sway until the strategy of covering agriculture news became a turn-of-the century winner for the Los Angeles Weekly Herald. Poetry's local queen, Josephine Smith, signed herself "Ina" and was later (by then named Ina Donna Coolbrith) designated poet laureate by the state legislature.

Multiculturalism: the Old Normal

The Star/La Estrella, a weekly, was L.A.'s first newspaper, begun by and for newly dominant Americans in 1851, and it was bilingual from the start. La Crónica, a Spanish-language paper from 1872-92, started as a weekly and became a semi-weekly. By the late 1870s, there were also German- and French-language newspapers; by 1910, Japanese, Swedish, and Slavic. The California Owl, targeting African American readers, was founded in 1897 (later becoming The Eagle); the Bnai Brith Messenger began the same year (named Emanu-El at first) for the large Jewish community. William Spaulding recalled that weekly City Council meetings, with all discussion translated into the three languages (Spanish, English, French) spoken by the various councilmen, were so long and repetitive he could have his copy "ready to turn in to the printer, subheds and all, as soon as I reached the office."

Arch Rivals

We should know a lot more than we do about Francisco Ramírez, a trilingual (English, Spanish, French) fourteen-year-old Californio who worked for a year as compositor and translator when The Star/La Estrella began, then returned to L.A. after schooling to found the Spanish-language El Clamor Público at age seventeen. El Clamor incorporated occasional English sections and, for a while, a regular French page. Ramirez was an ardent Republican who railed against the (widely prevalent) lynching of Mexicans. He ran for state senator in 1863, losing to Star editor Henry Hamilton. Hamilton, an Irish immigrant, was known for colorful partisan editorials that bitterly opposed Lincoln. Under him, the Star was excluded from the U.S. mails for a year in 1862 because it had been used "for the purpose of overthrowing the government of the U.S." A few months later, he was arrested, held for ten days, and released after taking a loyalty oath. He continued his anti-administration editorials and took his views to the state legislature.

Big Personalities on the Left

E.W. Scripps, the founder of the Los Angeles Record, the evening penny paper aimed at working-class readers, was a self-described "Damned Old Crank" who portrayed himself as an accidental capitalist but attracted a talented and energetic band of idealist-journalists, including Rueben W. Borough. As Borough remembered about his years there before WWI, "We were for civil liberties and we fought tooth and nail against every effort to prevent equal justice to racial and political minorities. We defended the Wobblies. A Wobbly was pretty hard to defend in a legal action, but he was entitled to defense and he got it." Even further to the left was Ricardo Flores Magón, a Mexican revolutionary born in Oaxaca who, beginning in 1910, published his banned anti-Diaz newspaper, Regeneración, from L.A. for several years in between stints in U.S. jails for advocating the abolishment of private property, along with other offenses.

A Real Newspaper Town

By the beginning of the 20th century, L.A. was a real newspaper town, with another four papers--The Times, The Evening Express, The Evening Herald, and The Examiner--joining the larger-circulation survivors from the first fifty years. The fraught commercial strategy of selling papers through sensationalized politics was updated to include some Hollywood spice.

And now here we are--online, evolved far beyond divisive debates because we have so many choices. Ignoring innuendo and and demagogic leaders because we are so well informed. Right? Right?

Susan LaTempa is the editor of the newly released Paperback L.A. Book 2: Studios, Salesmen, Shrines, Surfspots, and its predecessor, Paperback L.A. Book 1: Clothes, Coffee, Crushes, Crimes. The series features works by a broadly diverse roster that includes Eve Babitz, Chester Himes, Vin Scully, Lisa See, Jonathan Gold, Susan Sontag, Harry Shearer, Ray Bradbury, Naomi Hirahara, Hector Tobar, and many more.

Posted by Visiting Blogger at 11:22 PM | Permalink

Main entrance of the former Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. Los Angeles Public Library photo by Gary Leonard.

By Stephen Sachs

Tuesday marks the 50th anniversary of the shooting of Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. I was nine years old on June 4th, 1968. The morning RFK died two days later, the teachers and staff of my elementary school ushered all students out of our classrooms and lined us up to stand before the flag pole in our school courtyard, the flag at half-mast, in his honor.

Even so, another day twenty years later is more vivid for me.

On a sunny afternoon in 1989, I was a young actor in LA driving eastbound on Wilshire Blvd. As my beat-up blue Camaro crossed Normandie Avenue, I glanced to my right. The old Ambassador Hotel loomed ahead, its once glamorous sheen long faded and worn down like a relic from a distant age. The hotel once glistened as a crown on 23 acres of lawn lined with palm trees, the sweeping driveway curving toward the fabled entranceway where legendary movie stars once stepped out of long black limousines to drink, dine and dance at the Coconut Grove. Now, the stately Ambassador Hotel was closed to the public and empty. The property had just been purchased by Donald J. Trump, a brash hotel and casino magnate from Manhattan, who planned to demolish the historic Ambassador and construct a 125-story Trump office tower.

Although I had never seen it, the Ambassador Hotel was imprinted in my imagination and part of my family conversation at the dinner table for years. My father had reported on the Sirhan trial as a CBS newsman in 1969. I had closely studied dozens of photographs with my father of The Embassy Ballroom where Kennedy gave his final speech, and the kitchen pantry where the fatal shots were fired. I knew the ground plan of the Ambassador like the back of my hand. But I had never been inside.

I yanked the steering wheel of my Camaro to the right and pulled into the long curving driveway bending up toward the storied hotel. I quickly parked, cut off the engine and hopped out. Eyeing the front entrance, the enormous landmark seemed empty. Pickup trucks and construction equipment stood outside, but not one soul in sight. The front doors were open.

Even with the afternoon sun streaming in, the old lobby was dark and musty. The ornate front desk curved to my left, crystal light fixtures laced with dust hung above. A beefy workman in a white hard hat strode toward me, a load of metal piping hoisted on his shoulder. I strutted by him with purpose. He ignored me, assuming I belonged there. I did belong there. And knew exactly where I was going.

The heavy wood doors of the Embassy Ballroom groaned with a weathered ache as I pushed them open. The large hall was empty. Quiet. Three stately chandeliers still hung from the curved ceiling. The surrounding walls still curtained, masking the dull mirrors behind.

My footsteps echoed as I crossed the cavernous ballroom toward the stage where Kennedy gave his final speech. I stepped onto the platform, walking to the front of the stage to the spot where Bobby stood at the podium in the glare of TV cameras after winning the California primary ("And now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there"). From the stage, even peering out into a dark, empty ballroom, it was easy to see the hall packed with hundreds of jubilant campaign workers with balloons, waving signs, cheering with shouts of hope.

That night, in what would be his final public words, Bobby said, "What I think is quite clear is that we can work together. And that what has been going on in the United States over the period of the last three years -- the division, the violence, the disenchantment with our society, the division, whether it's between black and white, between the poor and the more affluent or between age groups or over the war in Vietnam -- we can start to work together. We are a great country and a selfless country and a compassionate country. And I intend to make that my basis for running in the next few months."

I then turned from the stage, as he did, and walked to the rear of the stage and out the door on the right to the kitchen. I passed through the door and stepped down a narrow ramp into the pantry. The kitchen was vacant, dirty and dilapidated like the galley of a sunken ocean liner. But there, to the right, was the row of ice machines and the spot where Bobby fell. The pantry, once exploding with terrified shrieks of pandemonium, was now as silent as a tomb.

LAPL photo by Tom Zimmerman.

Shortly after my pilgrimage to the Ambassador, Donald Trump announced his scheme to tear down the hotel and build, he boasted to the press, "the biggest building in the world." The world-record skyscraper would overshadow everything else in the neighborhood, a towering testament to Trump's ambition.

Trump's plan for the property was opposed by the Los Angeles Board of Education and the Los Angeles Unified School District, who wanted to build a much-needed school on the site. Harkening back to the militant 1960's, protesters outside the Ambassador in the 1990's chanted "Dump Trump" and carried signs saying, "Public need over private greed." After a decade of legal and financial battling, the District got the land and Los Angeles got its school. Today Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, a kindergarten-through-12th-grade campus, is there. Not a towering shrine to Donald Trump.

Fifty years is a long time ago. But 1968 and 2018 seem much the same. We are still a divided nation, ensnared in an endless war overseas we can't seem to escape. Racism, poverty, and the environmental issues are more urgent than ever. And the man who wanted to turn the place of Robert Kennedy's death into a colossal skyscraper named after himself is now President of the United States.

"If there is one overriding reality in this country, it is the danger that we have an erosion of a sense of national decency," Kennedy said. "Make no mistake. Decency is at the heart of the matter.... Poverty in this country is indecent. Illiteracy is indecent. The death or maiming of brave young men in the swamps of Asia, that is also indecent." Our nation lost more than a candidate in that hotel pantry fifty years ago. Its voice of youthful moral conscience and hope for change was silenced.

Today, decency and compassion are hard to find in Washington. Civility in government has gone missing. Hate-speak replaced eloquence on the campaign trail long ago. What would Robert Kennedy make of our world of politics today?

From the ashes of Bobby's murder site, a campus giving hope to our city's children has risen. From evil, can come good. The truth is simple but not always easy.

"What we need in the United States is not division, "Bobby Kennedy said two months before he died. "What we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country."

"This, in my judgment, in the year 1968, is a time to create, not to destroy. And that is why I run for President of the United States."

The time to create, not to destroy, is now.

Posted by Stephen Sachs at 11:56 PM | Permalink

Steve Seemayer with the original artwork used by his mother, Lynne Seemayer, to paint the Pink Lady over the Malibu Canyon tunnel in 1966. Backstory at LA Observed.

Click on the photo to see bigger.

Posted by Gary Leonard at 9:36 AM | Permalink

James Dean fills up in the Valley on Sept. 30, 1955. Photo by Rolf Wütherich

By Stephen Sachs

It is one of the most historic gas stations in Los Angeles. Seen by millions across the globe in an iconic photograph of a Hollywood legend. The destination for fans and followers worldwide as if on pilgrimages to a religious site. And it has now been torn down.

The gas station at the corner of Beverly Glen and Ventura Blvd in Sherman Oaks, where James Dean filled up the tank of his new 550 Porsche Spyder for the last time and then drove into immortality, has been demolished. One of the last remaining locations connected to Dean's final day is gone.

If you're a Dean fan, the gas station and the famous photograph snapped the final morning of his life are well known.

Originally named "Casa de Petrol," the gas station opened in 1948 as an adjunct to the landmark Casa de Cadillac dealership next door. At the time, the intersection on Ventura Blvd was known as "Casa Corner," and included a Casa burger stand and a "Casa de Cascade" car wash. Only the dealership remains and is still in service.

Sixty-one years ago today, on the morning of Friday, September 30, 1955, James Dean woke and had coffee. He was living in a log cabin-styled rented house on Sutton Street in Sherman Oaks a few blocks behind the La Reina Theatre, not far from the gas station. He had recently completed filming on "Giant" and was taking his new Porsche Spyder to Salinas for the car races that weekend. Mechanic Rolf Wütherich, stunt man friend Bill Hickman, and photographer Sanford Roth would go with him.

The group met that morning at Competition Motors in Hollywood, on Vine Street near Fountain Avenue, to give the Spyder one final check. Dean's father and uncle arrived at the shop for a visit. While the Porsche was being serviced and prepped for the race, the group walked across the street to the Hollywood Ranch Market for doughnuts and coffee.

Dean and Wütherich at Competition Motors that day.

The car was ready around 1:30 p.m. Dean slung himself into the driver seat of the Spyder, now dubbed "Little Bastard." Wütherich dropped into the passenger seat. They pulled out of Competition Motors and turned northbound up Vine Street, Hickman and Roth following behind in a Ford station wagon. To get to Route 99 (now the I-5), the group headed west down Ventura Blvd.

Dean needed to fill up the gas tank for the 345-mile drive to Salinas. He pulled into the gas station on Ventura at Beverly Glen, near his house, at approximately 2 p.m. He hoisted himself out of the Porsche to gas up the tank. Wütherich hopped out, grabbed Dean's camera and snapped a now-famous photo of Dean standing at the service island.

At approximately 2:15 p.m. Dean climbed back into the Porsche. He gunned the engine, with Wütherich beside him, and turned right on Ventura, then right on Sepulveda Blvd. on their way to Route 99 North and over the "Grapevine." Around 5 p.m, they stopped at Blackwell's Corner, a roadside café and gas stop in Lost Hills, to top off the tank, stretch their legs and grab a snack before heading on to Salinas. But Dean would never make it.

Dean was killed near Paso Robles at approximately 5:45 p.m, at the junction of Route 466 (now 46) and Route 41, when a 23 year-old Cal Poly student Donald Turnupseed, driving a black-and-white 1950 Ford Tudor, crossed into the highway intersection and slammed into Dean's Porsche. Turnupseed and Wütherich survived the crash. Dean became a legend. He was only 24 years old.

Many years before launching the Fountain Theatre, I was an actor. I became a Dean fan as an acting student at Los Angeles City College. Like generations of young actors before me, I was galvanized by James Dean. I was riveted by his films and read many books about him, studying the brooding photographs. I was thunderstruck. Not only by his raw, hypnotic acting. By him. His charismatic look, his outsider persona, the way he embodied an ache of loneliness twisted with a tormented, artistic intensity. He was cool.

When you're a passionate college acting student in your 20s, still figuring out who you are, Dean was the guardian angel of the troubled, misunderstood young man. Like millions of young male actors, he was "me." Or who I wished I was. I analyzed his acting, his posture, his walk, his manner. Researching his troubled life, he seemed like a vulnerable wounded man/child, perpetually reaching for something just out of grasp. The way he died sealed it. So young, so talented, so cool, enigmatic and beautiful. The low-slung sleek silver Porsche shooting down the dry, barren highway toward the sun. The metal shards and shattered glass exploding like a bursting star.

Dean and Wütherich on Sept. 30, 1955.

After ten years, I stopped acting. I began writing and directing plays. Running theatre companies in Los Angeles. I launched the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood in 1990. Married, became a father. Moved to the San Fernando Valley. No longer a young actor. I was soon a middle-aged husband and a dad with two sons. But I was still a Dean fan.

After dropping one son off at school at Sherman Oaks Elementary on Greenleaf Street, I would sometimes drive one block over to Sutton Street and stare at Dean's last home address. The house he rented there is gone, burned in a fire many years ago. A new modern home now hides behind a metal gate to keep onlookers out. But the tree-lined street looks much the same. It's easy to imagine Dean stepping out that bright morning on the last day of September, on what would be his final day.

Many years have passed. My sons and I have gotten older. The gas station where James Dean fueled up for his final ride became a flower shop in the 1980's. But they kept the original building intact. The service bays, filling pump islands, classic awning — all still there. Over the years, running errands with my wife and kids — chatting over play dates and summer camps and which detergent to buy at the grocery store — we would happen to drive by the old gas station in our family car. Silently, secretly, I'd shoot a glance at the empty service bay island and see Dean and the Porsche, filling up one last time.

Then, last week, came a shocking surprise. After dropping off my older son for an appointment, I drove by the old gas station. I couldn't see it. It was hidden, encased by heavy green construction fencing and iron scaffolding. Tractors, haulers and earth movers standing ready.

Casa de Petrol in 1961.

I frantically parked my blue Honda on Moorpark Street and dashed to the site. Found a gate in the fence and pushed in. The old gas station stood in front of me like a haunted abandoned relic surrounded by dirt, a large pile of rubble nearby. Two construction workers, wearing hardhats and work gloves, stood near their equipment. I rushed quickly to them.

"Do you mind if I have a look?" I asked. "I won't get in the way. You see, this is kind of an important place -"

"James Dean." The husky guy on the left, construction manager Doug Thane, smiled. I was clearly not the first fan to appear at the site since demolition began. There had been others.

"I didn't know anything about it, " admitted Thane. "And then people started showing up. Taking pictures. Wanting things. Some lady took a piece of pipe."

Thane's wiry co-worker, Curtis Listerman, squinted into the midday sun. "James Dean was cool, man," he nodded, running his hand over his balding head. "I look just like him."

"What's this place going to be after they tear it down?" I wanted to know. "What will go up in its place?"

"I don't know," Thane shrugged. He then pointed across the street. "I think a strip mall. Like that."

"Folks are saying they should make it a museum or something to James Dean," chuckled Listerman, wiping the dust from his mouth.

The station last week.

Another construction worker, Dave Wiesing, stepped up. Wiesing was a bit older. He confessed he was also a Dean fan. He knew what the fuss was about. Several times, he and his wife had taken part in the annual James Dean Final Drive, a yearly event on September 30th that draws hundreds of people from all over the world to trace Dean's route from the site of Competition Motors in Hollywood to the fatal intersection in Cholame.

"Is it okay if I have a look around?" I asked. "Before it's all gone?"

As construction manager, it was Thane's call. He peered at me and grinned. "Go ahead."

The small glass-paned office was long empty with graffiti sprayed across its walls. On the front door of the old office, someone had spray-painted the letter "J" and a heart. A message to Dean and the world.

I walked over to the service island and stood in the exact spot where Dean fueled up his Porsche nearly sixty-one years ago. Much was still there, as it was. The metal columns supporting the tin decorative awning, the cement pedestal that held the three red Mobil gas pumps. The pumps themselves were long gone but the footprints were still visible in the cement.

Standing there was like stepping into the famous photo snapped by Wütherich that fateful day so long ago. Everything looked liked it did. Except now a yellow tractor was parked where Dean's Spyder once stood.

"You want to take something?" Thane offered cheerfully.

"Can I? Really?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. "What do you want?"

Listerman and Thane

I glanced around. There was nothing in the huge pile of rubble that seemed connected to Dean in any way. And what was still there from the photograph — the columns, awning — were impractical to take. Then it hit me.

"Do you have a sledge hammer?" I asked Thane. He nodded. I beckoned. "Follow me."

I lead Thane and his sledge hammer over to the service island cement pedestal where Dean had fueled his car. The cement was still untouched. Unharmed. Intact. As it was when Dean was here.

"That," I pointed. "I want a piece of that." I chose the exact spot of the cement service island pedestal where the Porsche had been parked decades ago, where Dean stood. "There. Right there."

Thane hoisted the hammer. Raised it above his head. And with a loud grunt and a glisten in the sun, the sledge hammer swung down and — for the first time in sixty-one years — broke off a large chunk of history.

I held the heavy piece of cement like a holy artifact. A smaller chip broke off in my hand. I examined it up close. Like it was going to tell me something. What am I going to do with it? I don't know. But I knew I had to have it. I guess it's kind of like the people who chisel a chip off his tombstone. They want to hold a piece of something — anything — that will make them feel that way again.

My older son is now twenty-four, the same age as Dean. And the twenty-four year old actor I once was, so long ago, is a memory. What we once were is no more.

The house Dean rented on Sutton Street is gone. Competition Motors on Vine Street is gone. The Hollywood Ranch Market is gone. Even the original highway intersection where the crash occurred in 1955 is not there. It was moved. The highway was realigned decades ago. The crash site now sits in a grass field.

But the gas station had remained. Still standing. Until now.

Instead of a Porsche Spyder, I stroll back to my Honda. I get in. Drop the heavy chunk of cement in the back. The smaller chip I gently place in the cup holder between the front seats. A piece of Jimmy beside me.

Everything changes, including ourselves. Like old buildings torn down. What remains, we hold on to. Like the chip of cement I now keep in my car.

A talisman of James Dean and the young man I once was.

I turn the ignition of my Honda. Start the car. Rev the engine, good and loud, just to show I still can. Shift the gear into drive. Point my car toward the sun. And the afternoon horizon.

Stephen Sachs is a playwright, director, husband and father, and the Co-Artistic Director of the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood.

Posted by Stephen Sachs at 12:54 AM | Permalink

"Putting our best efforts into reforming the built environment as the means to reform ourselves and society is a remarkably deeply held belief in our culture, as if we modern urban dwellers are a cargo cult, putting faith in things to transform our souls and spirits."--Wade Graham, Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World.

Wade Graham's new book, Dream Cities, is a cautionary tale. It ranges widely through time and around the world. But it's aimed straight at Los Angeles, the author's hometown, right at our present moment.

Big dreams promising to transform our city are all the rage these days:

Frank Gehry is reimagining the LA River!

More than $120 billion in new funding for Metro will remake the way we move around LA! (If voters approve a sales tax increase in November.)

The Olympics will make LA a world-class city! (Again!)

The Third Los Angeles is on the way!

Graham's book is not explicitly about these new dreams. But it is about dreams that have shaped--and continue to shape--Los Angeles, and how people expect the built environment, a product of urban ideas, to shape our lives, indeed even our souls and spirits. Like all good histories, Dream Cities is about unintended consequences.

Graham is a landscape designer and writer. He lives in Echo Park and teaches at Pepperdine.

When he looks at Los Angeles, he sees a city of irreconcilable dreams.

All of the big urban ideas that he traces in Dream Cities are at work here in LA:

• The "romantic city" of the Spanish colonial villa, which can be seen most clearly in Santa Barbara, of course, but also in Beverly Hills and other wealthy redoubts around LA, where an imagined past confers the aura of historical legitimacy on a contemporary order.
• The "monumental city" of well-ordered boulevards, stately plazas, and trophy buildings, which can be seen around Grand Park, City Hall, the LA Times building, the Music Center, and most dramatically in Walt Disney Concert Hall, which manages the neat trick of looking futuristic while fulfilling the role of a monument reflecting "glory and gravity" back on the city and those who preside over it.
• The "rational city" of modern skyscrapers, "slabs" Graham calls them, connected by freeways. "A city made for speed is a city made for success," wrote Le Corbusier, the godfather of this dream. We see it in on Bunker Hill, in Park La Brea, and Century City.
• The "anticity" of "homesteads" seen everywhere in LA's most dominant form, the single-family home, sprawling ever outward, as people seek to be part of the city, but apart from it. Its most iconic form shows up beautifully in the famous nighttime image of the Stahl House (Case Study House #22), where two women sit serenely conversing in a modern home cantilevered over a hillside, with the parallel lights of the city's streets receding into the safe and scenic distance.
• The "self-organizing city" of neighborhoods, "cities within cities," epitomized in the apocryphal critique that Los Angeles is "72 suburbs in search of a city," variously attributed to Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley, and H.L. Mencken. But also in what all of us who live in the city know, that LA can be a very different city depending on which neighborhood you are in.
• The "shopping city" of malls, in which "maximizing shopping equals maximizing urbanism," seen here from Third Street in Santa Monica, to the Galleria, the Grove, CityWalk at Universal Studios, and more.
• The emergent "techno-ecological city," conceived as a kind of isolated space station in a harsh environment, concerned with the "metabolism" of the city, sustainability, water conservation, recycling, production of food and energy, and a changing climate.

Los Angeles isn't shaped by any one of these big ideas alone, Graham told me. Instead, LA is a city of "dynamic, problematic conflict between dreams," he said. Los Angeles is driven by contradictory ideas "that don't mesh well with each other."

So why are we now hoping that some new idea might somehow save the city?

"We buy into the promise of ideas," Graham said. It's easier than the hard work of "democracy, citizen participation, and boring things like that," he added. "And it leads us astray most of the time."

Despite the failure of all of these ideas to live up to their promises, Graham said, we still would like to believe that changes in the built environment could somehow miraculously solve all of our urban problems.

There is a "social project" inherent in all of the urban ideas that Graham writes about in Dream Cities. The architects and planners he profiles all believed that the right built environment would create better people, a better society, from Daniel Burnham's "Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men's blood...." to Jane Jacobs, who fought big plans on behalf of little neighborhoods.

"We put an incredible freight of meaning into objects that don't really deliver," Graham said.

What we really need to do instead is "disenchant our objects," because if we keep acting like a cargo cult, praying that the next big idea to fall from the sky will change our lives and our city, we may be waiting forever.

Posted by Jon Christensen at 10:09 AM | Permalink

If ever a city was built to be resilient to heavy rains, it is Los Angeles. And yet, El Niño is about to test just how resilient the city is in the short term to flooding, and even more importantly, how resilient it can be to water shortages over the long haul. And thereby hangs a tale about one of the central conundrums of urban resilience in the face of climate change, with implications far beyond the City of Angels.

Los Angeles has been preparing for El Niño in earnest since 1938, when a huge flood tore through the city, killing 49 people and causing $40 million in damage to public and private property (equivalent to more than $500 million today). In response, the city built a massive flood control system: the infamous, 51-mile, concrete-lined viaduct known as the Los Angeles River.

Heavy winter storms are not just El Niño's fault. They are a regular feature of this landscape. The aquatic conundrum is that this water removal system, which guaranteed the city's ability to withstand big storms barreling in from the Pacific nearly every winter, is now seen as the worst symbol and central cause of LA's problems with water management, especially in the aftermath of a punishing four-year drought, but even more so looking toward a future defined by climate change.

The hard lesson here is that infrastructure systems built to make cities resilient in one era may not serve them well at all in another era.

So far this winter, El Niño-stoked storms have been pummeling the Pacific Northwest, but weather watchers see the jet stream moving south, and the first major storms of the winter are drawing a bead on LA this week.

The city is as prepared as it can be in the short term. The news media have been announcing El Niño's arrival for months now. Websites have been set up to instruct residents on how to prepare their homes: clean gutters and drains, stock up on emergency supplies and know where to find sandbags if you live in a low-lying area. Municipalities have cleared major flood control infrastructure of debris. Warnings have been passed out to homeless people living in drainages prone to flooding. Emergency response teams have conducted swift-water rescue drills. Portable concrete traffic barriers called "k-rails" or Jersey barriers have been placed at the ready in canyons often subject to mudslides and debris flows in wet winters. And federal, state and local agencies have convened for "tabletop exercises" to simulate coordinated responses to a big storm event.

So with any luck, the worst result of this winter's storms will be that all the rainwater will swiftly fill the Los Angeles River's concrete banks to the brim and then flow harmlessly out to the Pacific Ocean, millions upon millions of gallons. But for anyone concerned about the city's long-term water woes, that will be a dismaying sight indeed. For the times have changed: today, we want to capture as much of that water as we can.

In California, we get essentially all of our water in the winter--typically, nearly all of it in just a few big winter storms, each passing through the state in just a few days. Most of that precipitation is stored as snow in the Sierra Nevada until it melts in the spring. Over the past century, the state was plumbed with these basic facts in mind. The "hazardous metropolis" of Los Angeles, as historian Jared Orsi dubbed the city, was made safe for millions of residents by diverting dangerous stormwater runoff directly to the ocean in order to avoid flooding and by importing water for actual use from the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River.

Now climate change threatens to disrupt this system, which is already overtaxed, especially during a drought.

Warmer winters are likely to mean less snow and more rain throughout California, and warmer springs with faster snowmelt and runoff. So the whole state of California is going to become more like Los Angeles, shedding water during wet winters to keep from flooding, while ruefully watching a precious resource wash out to sea.

There are now efforts under way to try to capture more rainwater locally in Los Angeles and statewide. The drought has renewed calls for building more dams and reservoirs to store runoff. But all of the best sites for water storage were already developed long ago. Ironically, groundwater aquifers depleted by pumping now present the best opportunities for storing surface water runoff, at least in areas where the underground cavities haven't collapsed because of land subsidence.

In Los Angeles, the city's eponymous river is the symbol of a new vision for a greener, more resilient ecological urbanism. Not so long ago, Lewis MacAdams, poet and founder of Friends of the Los Angeles River, made a name for himself by shouting "river" whenever anyone talked about the city's most famous and important "flood control channel." Now, not just river advocates, but city officials, urban planners, the famous architect Frank Gehry and even the Army Corps of Engineers, which built the flood control channel, see the river as the potential centerpiece of a more absorbent landscape to be wrested from the city's impermeable asphalt sprawl.

Plans call for reengineering the river, starting with an 11-mile stretch near downtown Los Angeles, widening the channel by terracing the banks, creating side channels and off-channel marshes and establishing riparian, freshwater marsh and aquatic habitat, all while maintaining existing levels of flood risk management. Farther off the river, parks and yards are being landscaped with permeable pavements and swales to slow down runoff and allow it to percolate into the groundwater.

All of these efforts will create lasting, incremental improvements to our current water system, while enhancing the environment for people and habitat for other species. But they can only go so far.

The rub is in our nature and our history. We live in a city built to weather California's erratic nature, which could well become even more erratic in the future. And while we might prefer to choose a new kind of resilient infrastructure for this new era, our history has narrowed the options.

Los Angeles needs the full capacity of the flood control channel only a few days a year. But on those days, the city really needs it. As bad luck would have it, those are exactly the days when the city gets most of its local rainfall for the entire year, the very same water it would like to store for the dry days inevitably ahead.

This column was also published in The Conversation, an independent source of news and views from the academic and research community, delivered direct to the public, with academic rigor and journalistic flair. Image of atmospheric river driven by El Niño aimed at Los Angeles on 5 January 2016 courtesy of NOAA.

Posted by Jon Christensen at 9:35 AM | Permalink

Los Angeles has been dining out on its postmodern myth of itself for too long, it seems. The city is like an aging intellectual hipster whose love of the ineffable fragmentary nature of the decentered urban experience has gotten old. We're looking for a steady long-term relationship now, a story we can believe in.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think so. I think this is the secret message at the heart of three very different works--an opera, a memoir, and an economic history--that have struck a strangely similar and resonant chord in Los Angeles this fall.

This came home to me while watching "Hopscotch," the drive-by opera, which closed this weekend after taking the city by storm over the past month. Underneath all of the very cool postmodern tricks--the opera is broken into 36 chapters scattered around different locations, which the audience experiences only in pieces, while traveling on three different routes through the city--"Hopscotch" is a good old-fashioned love story with a happy ending. There was something oddly touching--and maybe oddly touched, too--about driving downtown to put on headphones to watch people driving around the city in search of what: meaning, love, relationships, a story, all of the above? Yes, all of the above.

I wasn't surprised to find an essay by David Ulin, the LA Times book critic, in Hopscotch: The Mobile Opera, which is something of a cross between a long program and a short book for sale at "the central hub" in the Arts District, where audience members could watch the opera unfold on video screens if, like me, they were unable to snag a ticket to ride along. Ulin takes a somewhat similar journey, on a smaller scale, and on foot, in his new memoir Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles.

Ulin's book is also composed of different routes through the city--mostly the mid-Wilshire neighborhood, but sometimes farther afield--that don't necessarily, on the surface anyway, add up. And Ulin explicitly doesn't seem to care if they add up. That they don't add up is, in fact, an important part of his experience of Los Angeles. And, yet, there is in his perambulations, too, a palpable craving for meaning, love, relationships, a story to believe in.

"We each create our own Los Angeles," Ulin said in a recent conversation about Sidewalking and "the future of the urban experience in Los Angeles" sponsored by the Ruskin Art Club, LA's oldest cultural institution. "There is no master narrative," he said. "We're all forced to take it and make it our own."

And, yet, Ulin sees the possibility of a common urban experience and relationships emerging in Los Angeles, and at the Grove, of all places--the popular shopping complex that masquerades as a Main Street urban village in the mid-Wilshire area, a postmodern trick in its own way. Ulin said the Grove is cultivating a new kind of pedestrian experience in Los Angeles, even if most people do drive there. The Grove, he asserted, may be inauthentic, but it is "an inauthentic space in which authentic interactions can happen."

Relationships are also at the center of The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles, an economic history written by Michael Storper and colleagues. I wrote about their book previously here. If I were to boil down to one sentence their analysis of why the San Francisco Bay Area won the new tech economy and LA did not, it would be this: Relationships matter.

Storper was part of the so-called "LA School," a loose group of urban scholars who argued that Los Angeles represented a new kind of postmodern, decentered, fragmented metropolis that required a new kind of postmodern urban theory. Postmodern Los Angeles emerged from the deindustrialization and decentralization that started around the 1970s and has defined the metropolitan region ever since, though there are signs everywhere that a new vision of the city may be emerging.

It's telling that an age-old question is now crying out at the heart of this new city struggling to emerge from the postmodern metropolis: How can we cultivate relationships?

Posted by Jon Christensen at 6:59 PM | Permalink

The smell of smog makes me nostalgic. My Proustian madeleine moment is walking down the jet stairs to the tarmac at the Burbank airport on a warm day. That particular whiff of ozone and automobile exhaust combined with vaguely sweet overtones of citrus, chaparral, and hot asphalt gets me every time. I'm a kid again in the 1960s or 1970s, visiting my grandparents in Pasadena, when you couldn't see the San Gabriel Mountains from Vroman's Bookstore, which my grandfather owned and ran with his cousins.

A lot has changed since then. Being able to see the mountains most days of the year is one of the most visible counter-narratives to the lamentations about California's demise that every generation seems to relish here. Not to mention breathing the air.

Nobody misses the smog. But even though it is not as visible--or smelly--most days, we still have too much air pollution, regularly giving LA some of the worst air quality in the nation. But California's success in dramatically cleaning the air over LA led the way to national efforts and is now a signal to the world--particularly cities in South and East Asia regularly suffering some of the most dire air quality on the planet--that there is hope and a path forward.

That hope regularly brings Chinese officials to Los Angeles to learn the lessons of this transformation. It's also the message at the center of "Bending the Curve: Ten Scalable Solutions for Carbon Neutrality and Climate Stability," a new report by 50 researchers from across the University of California system, on which I was senior editor. Cleaning up the air--removing what scientists call the "short lived climate pollutants" that make up soot and smog--is the first major step in reducing global warming. It has immediate health benefits for people. And it buys us some time to work on reducing and eventually flat-lining long-term climate pollution from carbon dioxide, which we can't see or smell, but which persists in the atmosphere for thousands of years.

Can LA be a model for the world? I like to think so, or hope so, anyway. So does Chip Jacobs, author of Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles and The People's Republic of Chemicals, both written with co-author William J. Kelly. Smogtown has just been published in paperback with a new postscript that makes that argument, too.

"It's a tantalizing idea, isn't it?" Jacobs responded when I asked him what he thinks of California as an example. It's true, he said, that Chinese officials have been visiting California for years to learn how to monitor and reduce air pollution. In some cases they've implemented solutions in a few years that took California several decades.

But Jacobs offers some important caveats. Most of LA's smog came from cars, but some of it came from manufacturing that has gone overseas in recent decades. "Be careful when you ship something off to another country: you're exporting pollution," he said. "We allowed corporations to go and set up in cheaper more authoritarian places," he added. "They don't have to build in costs for pollution control. But the discount you're getting is at somebody else's expense."

As much as 20 percent of China's pollution is caused by exports to the United States, Jacobs said. Some of that pollution drifts back over the West Coast on the prevailing winds, and the carbon dioxide China pumps into the atmosphere adds to global warming.

Jacobs also said that while Chinese officials--and officials from other governments as well--are often eager to learn about scientific and technological solutions, they're not as quick to embrace another element of California's success: the ability of citizens to get access to information and to sue the government to take action. Some technocrats here have sometimes publicly wished that they could have the power of authorities in China just for a day.

But if the history of Smogtown is any guide, the power of the people is key to success. Public protests, environmental organizers, nonprofit lawyers, investigative scientists, crusading journalists, dedicated public officials, and democratically elected leaders all contributed to enacting laws and policies that have steadily ratcheted down pollution levels through regulations, taxes, and incentives.

Perversely, that success now leaves Jacobs worried about his hometown, too. "My biggest fear is public complacency," he said. We've paid our way out of our biggest problems, and we no longer "have an active, zesty engagement," he said. Aside from the hardcore activists and Prius drivers, "I'm not convinced Californians are dynamite environmentalists. People hate smog but they love their cars more. It's a passive environmentalism," he said.

"We've improved technology. We haven't changed the culture," Jacobs concluded. "We're a stabilized pollution island."

To really become a model for the world, it turns out, Los Angeles may need to relearn its own history. Rereading Smogtown is a good start.

For more on "Bending the Curve: Ten Scalable Solutions for Carbon Neutrality and Climate Stability," see my article in The Conversation and Q&A here. Want to see air quality in LA and around the world in real time? Check out the World Air Quality Index. And there's an app for that here in LA and around the United States: Air4U.

Photo by Peyri Herrera.

Posted by Jon Christensen at 10:34 AM | Permalink

Jean Louis Vignes' vineyard circa 1855. Photo by Frank Schumacher. Courtesy of the Seaver Center for Western Research.

California's wine industry began 175 years ago in Los Angeles, though given the grotesque human rights abuses involved maybe it's best the city isn't celebrating that particular slice of its history.

In 1840, a Frenchman named Jean Louis Vignes (pronounced Vines) shipped barrels of wine made from his Los Angeles vineyard to Santa Barbara, Monterey and San Francisco. The trip is regarded as the first commercial shipment of wine in California, a baby step that would eventually lead to today's $25 billion wine industry.

There are just a few reminders now of Los Angeles's significant role in the development of the California wine business, which it dominated until 1890. There is Vignes Street, of course, along with Bauchet Street, Wolfskill Street, Kohler Street, and Requena Street - all named after early Los Angeles winemakers. There are three grapevines more than 150 years old creeping along an arbor on Olvera Street. But Los Angeles has covered up more of its wine history than it has preserved. Union Station, for example, sits on top of what was once Vignes' famed "El Aliso" vineyard, named for its towering sycamore tree.

Maybe it's no surprise that Los Angeles is ignoring the 175th anniversary milestone since aspects of the city's early involvement with wine were reprehensible. While many people know that Father Junipero Serra and the Franciscan fathers treated the Native Americans badly during the Mission era, virtually enslaving them to plant vineyards and harvest and press grapes, few realize that the Californios and Americans who flooded the state during the Gold Rush treated them even worse. Los Angeles gets special mention for the harsh and punitive laws it enacted to force Native Americans to make wine.

When Mexico secularized the mission system in 1833, it freed Native Americans from their enforced indenture. Early attempts to award them land for houses and crops failed, and the result was a nation of rootless Indians who lived on the edge of starvation or worked for a pittance in the ranchos, pueblo farms and vineyards around Los Angeles. Many of them only owned the clothes on their backs. They lived in two settlements in Los Angeles where many drank to excess and got in fights. In 1846, Los Angeles authorities, concerned about the growing violence in the camps, expelled the natives from town.

Americans took the brutal treatment of Indians a step further, in part to alleviate the severe labor shortage caused by the Gold Rush. The first law passed by the fledging California Legislature on April 19, 1850 was nicknamed the "Indian Indenture Act." It stripped Native Americans of most of their rights and permitted vineyardists to force Native Americans to work against their will. All the would-be employers had to do was identify an Indian as a vagrant or drunk, which allowed a marshal or sheriff to arrest him and sell his labor for up to four months to the highest bidder to pay off the fine.

The Los Angeles Common Council adopted its own, stricter version of this law on Aug. 16, 1850, one that allowed the marshal to form Indian chain gangs to work on municipal projects. If the city didn't need any work done, the marshal could sell the native's labor to the highest bidder.

This law created a devastating cycle that decimated the Native American community in Los Angeles. The marshal and his deputies were paid a $1 kickback for every eight natives they rounded up, so on Sunday nights they would descend on the infamous Calle De los Negros to collect the inebriated Indians who had spent the weekend in the alley's gambling dens, brothels, and saloons. They were easy to find, as many had collapsed, drunk, in doorways, alleyways, and vacant lots. The marshal would then conduct a public auction and sell the Native Americans' labor for $1 to $3 a week.

"Los Angeles has a slave mart as well as New Orleans and Constantinople - only the slave at Los Angeles was sold fifty-two times a year as long as he lived, which generally did not exceed one, two, or three years under the new dispensation," Horace Bell, a newspaper publisher, wrote about Los Angeles in the 1850s.

Lithograph of Vignes' El Aliso winery, circa 1855. And a brandy distiller used by Vignes.

All this cheap labor transformed Los Angeles into the center of winemaking in California. By the early 1850s, there were about 100 vineyards in and around Los Angeles, including Vignes' fabled 35-acre vineyard along the river that had been tended by Native Americans. The verdant city earned the nickname the "City of Vines."

The end to southern California's dominance came quickly. People poured into Los Angeles during a boom in 1886 around the time the deadly Pierce's Disease knocked out the majority of vines in the region. Soon, most of Los Angeles' vineyards were converted to other uses. By 1890, northern California took the lead in the wine business; a position it has never relinquished.

Given this dark past - and there are many other examples of the greed and blood lust of the region's early wine history - it is no surprise that Los Angeles does not glorify its role in the creation of the California wine industry.

Frances Dinkelspiel is the author of "Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California." She will be speaking at the Homestead Museum in the City of Industry on Nov. 1 at 2 p.m., the Galleano Winery on Nov. 1 at 5:30 p.m.; the Huntington Library on Nov. 2 at noon and Book Soup in West Hollywood on Nov. 7 at 4 p.m.

Previously on LA Observed:
Books of the week

Posted by Frances Dinkelspiel at 10:35 PM | Permalink

The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles, a new book out this month, should be required reading for people who consider themselves leaders in Los Angeles, whether in politics, business, academia, advocacy, or philanthropy. It is a clear challenge. LA's leaders failed the city in the last generation. They focused on the wrong things and missed the boat on the new economy, which the San Francisco Bay Area commandeered and made its own.

Can we learn from the past? Now's our chance.

In the 1970s, LA and San Francisco were in the same economic club of cities. While the Bay Area has solidified its position in the very top rank of cities since then, Los Angeles is now in danger of slipping into the rank of middling metropolitan areas. If you look at the facts and compare the trajectory of major American metropolitan areas over the past 40 years, "Los Angeles most closely resembles Detroit," write the authors of this new book.

That's got to hurt, if anyone is paying attention. And they better be.

The lead author of this searing analysis of how San Francisco beat LA to the new economy is a heavy hitter. Michael Storper is an economic sociologist and geographer with appointments at UCLA, the London School of Economics, and Sciences Po in Paris.

He and his co-authors make a persuasive case that Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area were in the same position at the dawn of the high-tech economy in the 1970s. They each had similar resources--great universities, tech talent, investors, civic institutions, nonprofit organizations--and similar weaknesses, including fragmented local governments across a diverse metropolitan region.

But San Francisco kept its eyes on the prize. And LA "foundered," the authors write. As a result median household incomes (after subtracting housing costs) are now 50 percent higher in the Bay Area than in LA. People enjoy higher wages across the board in the Bay Area. They're better educated. There's way more venture capital investment, more creative jobs, more inventions, new companies, and more high-paying jobs being created in the Bay Area.

What happened?

I just reviewed The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies for the San Francisco Chronicle. So I won't go over the case the authors make again here. Suffice it to say it is rigorously constructed and very persuasive. The book is written like a detective story, as the authors systematically examine the usual suspects that LA blames for its fate--geographic expanse, population size, immigration, the collapse of the aerospace industry--and carefully dismiss them one by one.

The fault, they conclude, is not in our stars, but rather in our leaders and our civic and business culture, or perhaps, more accurately, lack of it.

You can argue with this, but ignore it at your own peril. Actually, not just at your own peril, it turns out. At our city's peril.

And that's what I want to focus on here. What went wrong in LA? Can we fix it? Or are we too late?

The short answer is that LA's leaders in government, business, academic, and civic institutions failed to grasp the "zeitgeist" of the new economy--its open-source spirit. They failed to cultivate the "invisible colleges"--vibrant relational networks of investors, entrepreneurs, and scientists--that fostered new technologies, new businesses, and new jobs in the Bay Area. LA's universities, businesses, governments, and civic groups kept each other more at arm's length.

LA's leaders talked about the "new economy," but they actually focused on the opposite: keeping light manufacturing in the city, reducing business and development costs, and improving the vast logistics and transportation system around the ports in San Pedro and Long Beach. That was all well and good, the authors of The Rise and Fall argue, for low paying jobs. But it was a major distraction from the opportunities at hand.

Now we are trying to play catch-up. We've got Silicon Beach, though it's not big enough to have moved the needle significantly, yet. We have an open-source ethos in government, just like everybody else now. And there are efforts underway to change the civic "zeitgeist."

The" Future of Cities: Leading in LA" initiative, founded by public affairs consultant Donna Bojarsky, is one. When it convenes its first big conference in October, it will be interesting to see if it can get beyond the ideological grandstanding and divisive carping which seemed to characterize its debut earlier this summer.

But reforming this city's civic culture is going to take a lot more than a few high-minded salons and gab fests. We are way behind, and there is a long journey ahead. LA's leaders might want to sit down and draw a new roadmap for the city after reading The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles. Then get to work.

___________________________________

The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons From San Francisco and Los Angeles. By Michael Storper, Thomas Kemeny, Naji P. Makarem, and Taner Osman. (Stanford University Press; 328 pages; $60).

Posted by Jon Christensen at 2:29 PM | Permalink

Jon Christensen writes: Atlases implicitly invoke the myth of Atlas, the god who carried the world on his shoulders. An atlas is designed to embrace, contain, and carry a world in its collection of maps.

All maps tell stories about the relationships between things in space. You are here at Union Station. Just in front of you are four rows of Mexican fan palms, Washingtonia robusta, natives of Sonora and Baja California. Across the street: a Moreton Bay Fig, Ficus macrophylla from Australia. Just behind that: an olive tree, Olea europea, from the Mediterranean.

Atlases tell stories about the relationships between the maps they contain. How are the trees of El Pueblo related to the carp in the Los Angeles River related to fires in the El Puente and Chino Hills, the San Gabriel and Santa Monica Mountains? And how are these related to the early ranchos of Los Angeles, homesteaders out in Antelope Valley, the various street grids of Los Feliz, Encino, Watts, and the crazy compass rose of LA's freeways?

LAtitudes: An Angeleno's Atlas, just out from Heyday, whole-heartedly embraces the Whitmanesque myth of Los Angeles: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

To call this a myth, I hasten to add, is not to say it isn't true. To truly know LA whole may well be impossible. It often seems so. To know LA, we are told, one must explore its neighborhoods and enclaves--even if they are constantly shifting, constantly being renamed, making maps out-of-date as soon as they are made, as Rosten Woo argues in "Naming Los Angeles," a map and essay in this new atlas. One must pick a path through this postmodern metropolis--hunt for the "speakeasy tacos" with Michael Jaime-Becerra, investigate a mysterious historical bike path with Dan Koeppel, trace the city through lyrics with Josh Kun, explore the radio dial with Lynell George, listen to the undocumented with Jen Hofer, get to know the city's ugly buildings with Wendy Gilmartin, its tribal landscapes with Cindi Moar Alvitre, its toxic legacies with Laura Pulido, cowboys and spacemen with Steven M. Graves, LGBT pioneers with Sylvia Sokup, Xican@ politics with Luis J. Rodriguez.

This is a subjective city, this atlas argues. There is no point-of view that can take it all in objectively.

In Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote of Queequeg's native home Rokovoko: "It is not down in any map; true places never are."

LAtitudes is full of true places.

What are the relationships between these very different maps of very true places? Though most of the maps overlap in space, and many in time, too, this atlas doesn't try to answer that question. It leaves us to carry those contradictions.

Note: A series of book launch events begins May 2 in the evening at Clockshop with tacos, drinks, and presentations by the authors, followed on May 3 by a walking tour and launch party at Skylight Books. For more information: LAtitudesbook.com. LAtitudes: An Angeleno's Atlas, Edited by Patricia Wakida; Foreword by Luis Alfaro; Introduction by Glen Creason. Heyday: 248 pages, with 19 full-color maps and infographics, $30. Image of 25 LA freeway interchanges aligned on top of one another at the same scale and compass orientation from the atlas.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 10:30 AM | Permalink

Jon Christensen writes: A very warm weekend in early March, even near the beach, two beautiful new books on architecture in Los Angeles, and the rise of two big-box homes on our block have left me in a melancholy mood.

Will we look back on late 20th century LA--often thought of as the worst of times, with the city's sprawling conquest of nature--as paradoxically the best of times, when a style of architecture briefly prevailed that invited the outside in, and the inside out? When a congenial climate enabled a modern style that opened up homes to nature through sliding floor-to-ceiling glass doors and floors that flowed seamlessly from the living room to the patio, while the garden flowed back indoors too?

This style is lovingly documented in Outside In: The Architecture of Smith and Williams, which celebrates the work of architects Whitney Smith and Wayne Williams, and Crestwood Hills: The Chronicle of a Modern Utopia, which celebrates the LA neighborhood shaped by Smith and Williams, along with architect A. Quincy Jones. They were inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's dictum: "We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the
outside may come inside, and the inside may and does go outside."

That's all over, I'm afraid. The new big-box homes on my block, like so many others around LA, have been built lot line to lot line. No outdoors survives on these properties.

California's climate and landscape made a modern "outside in" architecture and lifestyle possible. These new homes are designed for the climate coming our way. Unwittingly, to be sure, because maximizing square footage seems to be the main motive. But these are bunkers against a hotter, drier, harsher LA, designed to shelter in and keep the outside out.

Los Angeles is going to get hotter over the next several decades no matter what we do to try to stop climate change, says UCLA climate scientist Alex Hall, who has brought global climate models down to the neighborhood scale in LA. Increasing temperatures are "baked in," as they say, because of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases already in the air.

The farther from the ocean, the hotter it's going to get, Hall's model predicts. Of course. We all know that. It's already true. But even near the beach, temperatures are rising.

June gloom may become a thing of the past. Our urban heat island--concrete and asphalt retain heat and remain warmer even at night--has been steadily pushing fog and clouds higher into the sky over the past 67 years, according to a study in Geophysical Research Letters.

So precisely during the time when "outside in" architecture flourished and defined the modern Southern California lifestyle, the building boom of the post-war era helped create the conditions that could make it unpleasant if not untenable in the future.

Add this to the ironies of our postmodern predicament.

At least we'll have these pretty picture books to remind us of the way things used to be when LA was modern.

Crestwood Hills: The Chronicle of a Modern Utopia. By Cory Buckner. (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2015. 177 pp. 200 photos and illustrations. $35 paper)

Outside In: The Architecture of Smith and Williams. Edited by Jocelyn Gibbs. (Los Angeles: Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara in association with Getty Publications, 2014. 192 pp. 221 photos and illustrations. $49.95 hardcover)

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 1:09 PM | Permalink

I stole the above headline from this week's "Projects We Love" newsletter on Kickstarter. Kickstarter's staff is promoting a new campaign to raise funds for a documentary about the black cowboy lifestyle in Compton, California--an important part of Los Angeles history. "Fire on the Hill: The Story of the Compton Cowboys" details the story of a group of riders who preserve the traditions of the black cowboy lifestyle in Compton. The current iteration of the group devotes itself to gang intervention activities and struggles to rebuild its stables, which burned to the ground in 2012.

The filmmakers need to raise $60,000 by Saturday, March 21st in order to complete their film. They are only 1/3 of the way there.

Please check out this important project and support it.

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 11:35 AM | Permalink

Jon Christensen writes: LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne has a grand narrative. And he's not just a chronicler of the Los Angeles story. He's a cheerleader. A goad. And a protagonist now.

Beginning this week, Hawthorne is taking his campaign on the road in a series of public events meant to spark conversations and get citizens behind a vision for a city that he argues is moving into a dramatically new phase.

Hawthorne calls this "the third Los Angeles." The first event in his series with the same title is "Welcome to the Third Los Angeles" at Occidental College this Thursday evening, February 12. Hawthorne hopes not only to be present at the transition to this new era, he wants to help usher it in. Regular readers of his columns in the Times will know the broad outlines of Hawthorne's story.

The "first Los Angeles," Hawthorne argues, lasted roughly from the 1880s to the eve of World War II. The city grew at an exponential pace, but it had a "dense, compact and walkable downtown," Hawthorne wrote recently in an email announcing the Third Los Angeles Project, "and a comprehensive streetcar system along with a string of great public buildings" and "inventive multifamily residential architecture."

The "second Los Angeles" ran from World War II to the turn of the millennium. It was the era of suburbs writ large, at the scale of the metropolis. "Our most important and innovative architecture, to a dramatic and new degree, was the detached single-family house with private garden," Hawthorne wrote, and "our public realm shriveled as we built freeways and tore out streetcar lines." In time, LA became Mike Davis's dystopian City of Quartz, which marks its 25th anniversary this year.

Now we are entering the third Los Angeles, or maybe just "on the cusp of it." Hawthorne doesn't seem sure which. But he is sure that "Los Angeles is in the midst of profound reinvention," as he put it. "Or perhaps it's better to call it a profound identity crisis," he added.

"Having run out of room to sprawl, virgin land to conquer," Hawthorne wrote, "the city is doubling back on itself, constructing more infill development and experimenting with denser housing and vertical architecture. We are finally building a comprehensive and public mass-transit system to match the privately run one of the First L.A."

But, Hawthorne hastens to add, this third LA is no utopia. At least not yet. "For many Angelenos, its emergence threatens to wipe out what has always made the city singularly attractive," he wrote, "notably its great supply of single-family neighborhoods with private gardens. Fault lines are opening up between longtime residents and younger ones frustrated by the price of real estate or eager to see long-awaited transit lines and new park space finally completed."

Environmental challenges loom. Global warming will make LA--once known for its climate of ease--hotter, drier, and harsher. Sea level rise will eat away at our coast. And "we will have to figure out a way to capture and store more rainwater instead of sending it efficiently to the ocean," Hawthorne observed.

At the same time, he wrote, "a city known for inventing, for saying yes, is becoming more skilled and more active at protecting, for saying no--a shift that has profound implications for how we see ourselves and how the world sees us."

And if Angelenos are getting better at saying "no," the coming of Hawthorne's third Los Angeles may not be a foregone conclusion after all. This might actually be one of the defining political and cultural battles of our times.

Photo of Christopher Hawthorne and Mayor Eric Garcetti at Oxy's Keck Theater last year courtesy of Occidental College.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 3:44 PM | Permalink

Jon Christensen writes: There is nothing extraordinary about the space under the North Spring Street Bridge just north of downtown Los Angeles. But that has done nothing to diminish its power to suggest and actually become a refuge from gang violence, a no man's land where the regular rules of street life were suspended, a gallery for graffiti and other art, a stage for music, a performance studio, a workshop, a town hall, a place for weddings and birthday parties, and even a Garden of Eden for some.

In the city of Los Angeles there are 12,309 blocks worth of alleys like the one that runs along the north side of the North Spring Street Bridge before it crosses the Los Angeles River--a total of 914 linear miles, according to a 2008 study by researchers at the University of Southern California. Each one could suggest, as a neon sign installed under the Spring Street bridge by USC professor Manuel Castells suggests: "Another city is possible."

Under Spring: Voices + Art + Los Angeles, a new book by Jeremy Rosenberg, chronicles the extraordinary history of the transformation of the space under the Spring Street bridge between 2006 and 2013--which brought people and plants and parties of all kinds to "Under Spring," as the space came to be known. With a project to widen the bridge underway now, the future of that space is uncertain. But Rosenberg's book does what the best histories do. It reveals the possibilities alive in the past. And it attunes us to the possibilities alive around us today--12,309 possibilities.

Under Spring came alive because of an unusual confluence. Artist Lauren Bon's Metabolic Studio backs on to the alley. Ed Reyes, the city councilmember from the first district, took an interest in the project to clean up and "activate" the space, in the lingo of urban planners. And Al Nodal, president of the city's Cultural Affairs Commission, ran the bureaucratic traps to make it work. The key was an aptly named but little used provision in city rules called an "alley vacation." Since the space was not needed for any commercial uses other than those of the Metabolic Studio, it could be closed off and used for more creative public purposes. Under Spring became an ongoing, evolving work of art, created and curated by Metabolic Studio.

"This place was not unique in this city or nationally," Nodal told Rosenberg, "there are lots of underpasses, cul-de-sacs and traffic triangles. All absurd and eminently creative spaces."

Matt Coolidge, founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, told Rosenberg: "When things don't have a designated function, anything else can occur." He added: "One could imagine that Los Angeles, of all cities, might have some of the most real estate that is interstitial space. Either under bridges or as part of flyovers and cloverleaves and freeway exchanges where the ramps kind of soar up and create little triangles or circles of space that you can't really get to. It's in those kinds of corridors, those eddies, those incidental spaces, where things that aren't scripted activities can take place."

Unfortunately, Under Spring's "alley vacation" is over. But here's a suggestion for Mayor Eric Garcetti inspired by Rosenberg's book: create a new Department of Interstitial Spaces. OK, maybe not a department. Just a small team, with a czar, or better yet, a wizard like Al Nodal in charge. The mission: scout out emerging opportunities where artists, neighborhood organizations, and citizens are re-imagining neglected patches of public space in the city, and help nudge the bureaucracy to get out of their way.

"This site in general, and Los Angeles in particular, is so full of destitute people and destitute places that the effort to rescue these destitute places and regenerate them is probably one of the most crucial projects," Manuel Castells told Rosenberg, for "a new kind of city and a new kind of society. Because we have made too much use of a policy of scorched lands in our cities. We'll call it a disposable city. You use it and throw it away." But, Castells added, "another city is possible, and even in Los Angeles, another Los Angeles is possible."

Possible, perhaps. That's at least what Under Spring suggests. But Under Spring is history now, beautifully captured in the chorus--verging on cacophony--of voices in Rosenberg's book. And it's unlikely that the unusual confluence that came together under the North Spring Street Bridge can be replicated in the thousands of other interstitial spaces that Matt Coolidge notes were "never intended to be used" but "represent a kind of untapped resource" in neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles.

But with a little help from city hall to clear the way, citizens might tap the great resource of public space for creative purposes in their own communities. Because if history shows us the possibilities alive in the past, and attunes us to the possibilities alive around us today, it is so that we can act.

Note: I'm on the board of trustees of the California Historical Society, which awarded Under Spring: Voices + Art + Los Angeles the 2013 California Historical Society Book Award. The book was published this fall by Heyday in collaboration with the California Historical Society.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 3:31 PM | Permalink

Jon Christensen writes: Last Thursday, I woke up to find myself "a giant douchebag" on Reddit and a "jackass" on Twitter. "You are a moron" was the subject line for a simple email that said nothing more. An angry voicemail ended with the declaration: "We will never let you ruin our planet! Period!"

I went out to my front yard and picked up the cause of this wrath. There I was on the front page of the newly revived California section of the LA Times quoted in a story about rethinking John Muir, "the patron saint of environmentalism," as we approach the 100th anniversary of his death in Los Angeles on December 24, 1914.

Muir's legacy is "just not useful anymore," I was quoted as saying to LA Times environmental reporter Louis Sahagun. It was right there in black and white, next to a picture of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt in Yosemite. And then there was the kicker. "Muir's a dead end," Sahagun quoted me saying. "It's time to bury his legacy and move on."

I don't come here to dispute anything about Sahagun's story, especially the quotations attributed to me. My quotations are accurate and the story reflects a range of perspectives on Muir's legacy, including mine.

But I do come here to apologize to the many people I offended on Thursday and afterward as the story ricocheted around the Internet. I have heard you. I am sorry that I came across as disrespecting John Muir and his history. And I am especially sorry that I seemed to publicly denigrate your passion for understanding and caring for nature, because I share that passion. And the way that I stated my view was blunt, insensitive, and meant to provoke, like, well, a jackass.

I understand and respect that, as one friend said, Muir's "connection with the power of nature serves to inspire us with wonder" and "is valuable and abiding." That friend added, by the way, that I am "insane." Another friend reminded me that environmentalists owe "a great debt" to Muir, whose use of science and gathering of supporters for environmental causes are "as relevant today" as they were when Muir was alive. I meant no disrespect for people who feel this way, many of whom are my friends, or were before Thursday anyway.

I had meant to provoke and inspire a debate, a venerable form of exploring ideas in educational settings such as UCLA, where I teach, and beyond. I was being the devil's advocate in a debate with my colleague and friend Glen MacDonald, who was recently appointed to a new John Muir memorial chair in geography at UCLA. Glen shares many of the sentiments of Muir's most ardent admirers. "For all his flaws, Muir did a lot of great things and his enthusiasm for nature continues to inspire," Glen told the LA Times.

Together, Glen and I explored our different views of Muir in more depth-- and brought many more diverse voices into the conversation -- in the most recent issue of Boom: A Journal of California dedicated to "Thinking with Nature: A Century Beyond John Muir." We also brought contributors to that issue together with other thinkers and doers to widen the conversation in a symposium that brought hundreds of people to UCLA on Thursday. That was the peg for Sahagun's story in the LA Times.

One of the best things about academia is that we can argue intensely in a symposium or classroom about things that matter deeply to us and to the world. We can and often do disagree. And we can go out for a drink afterward and remain friends and colleagues.

One of Thursday's participants argued that is it my job as a historian "to make John Muir relevant in today's America." Another argued the opposite: "We need to find new stories." Both have dedicated their lives to important environmental work, for which I am grateful.

When I say I was playing the devil's advocate on Thursday, I do not mean to disavow what I said. But I was up against a man many revere like a saint, and so, I was, by definition, it turns out, on the side of the devil. And I now realize that the way I expressed my views in my informal debate with Glen, which Louis Sahagun reported in the LA Times, sounded rude to many people.

As a historian, I did not in any way mean to suggest that we should not teach our kids about John Muir, understand his great accomplishments, as well as his human flaws, and the great work he has inspired among generations of environmentalists. What I meant to argue has to do with the difference between history and legacy. I value the history of John Muir. But I also think that Muir's legacy -- what he means today -- is no longer very useful and in some ways stands in the way of what needs to be done today. His vision of a California divided in three -- between cities where people live and work, the economically productive landscapes of farms, ranches and mines, and the wilderness cathedrals of nature -- is no longer a useful way to think about people and nature in the 21st century. We need to value people and nature everywhere. And along with many others, including the environmentalist who told me it is my job to make Muir relevant, I worry that Muir's message "does not resonate with so many people" anymore. Not only does it not resonate, it also excludes many people who will have to be engaged if we want the love for nature that so many of us share to continue to thrive in California.

I have what I hope is a constructive reason for rethinking John Muir. That reason is this: John Muir was a terrific hero for the 19th and 20th centuries. And he accomplished amazing things in his own life and in the work he has inspired. But while we might take inspiration from Muir as a founder of the environmental movement, we can't count on him for guidance now, any more than we can turn back to George Washington as a guide to politics today. We need new conservation and environmental heroes. And those modern heroes will likely look very different from John Muir. They might be Latina, female, love cities, worry about social justice, and want a cabin in which to spend a night in a state park. They might be black, love car camping with their kids, and cooking outdoors. And, heck, one might be a young techie taking a long solo hike in the Sierra with nothing more than a crust of bread, climbing a swaying tree in a storm, and snapping a selfie to share on social media.

I'd like to meet all of them and include all of them in this conversation. So let's celebrate John Muir's heroic efforts on behalf of nature, but also recognize we need a whole new generation of heroes. And those heroes should not feel constrained by Muir's legacy, as long as they care for nature passionately in their own ways.

May I also add one more thing? I recognize that a lot of environmental and conservation organizations, including the Sierra Club, as well as park agencies--local, regional, state, and national--share these concerns and are determined to become more inclusive. These efforts are important. They give me hope.

I am sorry that my words were a divisive wedge. While I intended to provoke a debate, I did not want the debate to be polarizing.

Still stinging from responses to the LA Times story, I found myself in the men's room at the end of the day on Thursday feeling a little paranoid perhaps. One of the other guys washing his hands was a sturdy, stern-looking, elderly gentleman with a cane. I had a fleeting vision of being caned right then and there 19th-century style. And I glanced around furtively wondering if anyone would come to my defense.

But as we walked back out to the symposium, the old man turned to me. "Thank you," he said. "You made us think."

"You're welcome," I stammered in surprise. "That's what we're supposed to do here at the university," I said. "That's our job."

John Muir obituary from the Los Angeles Record from the Dr. Walter Lindley Scrapbook Collection, Hornold/Mudd Library at the Claremont Colleges, courtesy of Boom: A Journal of California.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 12:30 PM | Permalink

Jon Christensen writes: Two California lakes. One, the Salton Sea, a festering manmade disaster in the desert southeast of Palm Springs. The other, Tulare Lake, a phantom lake, once the largest west of the Mississippi, dried up by agriculture in the southern San Joaquin Valley, now a vast flat expanse of monotonous farm fields.

Not the first places one might expect to find hope in the Anthropocene--this new epoch that scientists say we are now living in, a period in which the human imprint on Earth has become so pervasive and dominant that it will leave a distinct mark on geological strata in deep time.

But a gritty, tenacious kind of hope ran through a public conversation about these "altered landscapes" at the Autry National Center on Saturday, featuring photographer Kim Stringfellow, a chronicler of the Salton Sea and surrounding desert, filmmaker Christopher Beaver, who has just completed a documentary about Tulare Lake, and writer Eileen Apperson, whose great-grandparents were of the generation that last saw Tulare Lake and who now would like to see it restored.

There are two typical responses to altered landscapes such as the transformation of California's Central Valley from a maze of wetlands and swamps into a kind of vast, orderly factory for producing food and fiber, the richest agricultural region in the country. One reaction is amazement and pride at what human beings can accomplish, transforming entire landscapes to make survival in an arid landscape not only possible, but to produce enormous wealth as well. The other reaction is regret and even shame in the face of what has been lost and may never be recovered.

These two responses also characterize the often diametrically opposed views that people bring to the Anthropocene. On the one hand, the optimists say, isn't it amazing what human beings have done while becoming the dominant force on Earth? We can now manage the planet. Let's do so wisely. On the other hand, the skeptics respond, what hubris! The path forward is not more human domination of the planet. Look what we have wrought. We must organize an orderly retreat to ensure room for nature.

But the conversation at the Autry showed there is another way to understand these altered landscapes, the hybrid landscapes of nature, the built environment, and culture that characterize so much of California and the world. And that is through understanding their complicated histories--and through them our own histories--which can lead to a strange love of these altered, damaged places, as the kinds of places where we will and must begin to think about the future.

As Eileen Apperson said of her family in the San Joaquin Valley, "Each generation saw a different landscape, and they would alter it in their own ways." Her grandparents grew alfalfa for sheep and her own generation brought subdivisions and strip malls. But now they are beginning to see some restoration and preservation of natural areas in the valley, in little pockets among the row crops, orchards, and dairies. Apperson tells this story in her book, Pattern of the Land: The Search for Home in an Altered Landscape.

For Kim Stringfellow, author of Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905-2005, the Salton Sea shows that we need to think about even the most marginalized and blighted landscapes as areas we need to protect. A huge agricultural sump, the Salton Sea was dismissed as unnatural because it was created by an engineering mistake until people realized that "wildlife will take what it can get," she said. "Animals don't know the difference between pristine and manmade," she said of the birds that depend on the lake on the Pacific Flyway. But the lake's ecosystem is collapsing as the water becomes hyper-saline. Somehow a new future must be imagined and then created for the Salton Sea.

The history of Tulare Lake shows "how quickly we can alter the land" if we put our minds to it, said filmmaker Christopher Beaver, whose documentary "Tulare: The Phantom Lake" includes a rare photograph of the lake around 1910, with water stretching as far as the eye could see. "In 40 years, it was gone," said Beaver. He compared the trajectory of California's altered landscapes to a railroad yard in Fresno, with different tracks leading toward different futures, some leading to more dams, another to tunnels through the Delta, yet others toward restoring the San Joaquin River and even Tulare Lake. "We can make choices," he said. Take the LA River, he added, which winds by the Autry National Center in Griffith Park. "Wow! Does that look different than 10 years ago."

Note: "Altered Landscapes" at the Autry National Center was co-presented by Boom: A Journal of California. The fall issue of Boom focuses on "Thinking with Nature: A Century Beyond John Muir."

Top photo of the Salton Sea courtesy of Kim Stringfellow. Bottom photo of Tulare Lake from "Tulare: The Phantom Lake," a documentary by Christopher Beaver.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 3:06 PM | Permalink

Jon Christensen writes: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." It's September 3, 1964. On a portico at the White House, President Lyndon Johnson is signing the Wilderness Act, which has just been approved in the U.S. Senate 73 to 12 and in the House of Representatives 373 to 1. Republican and Democratic champions of the bill flank the president, who, at the same time, also signs the Land and Water Conservation Act, a bill to use royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling to fund projects ranging from remote wildlife refuges to recreational parks in city centers. It has passed the House by acclamation on a voice vote and the Senate 92 to 1.

I was a child of this era, only four years old in 1964, but it is foreign to me. I think I would like to visit this country, but I know that "you can't go home again." There's no rewinding of the tape of history. And that's OK. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to live there.

The Civil Rights Act was passed in the summer of 1964, too, after the longest continuous debate in Senate history. Just four days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 23, 1963, Johnson had delivered his first address as president to a joint session of Congress. "We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights," he said. "We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law."

In March 1964, southern Democrats launched a filibuster when a civil rights bill, passed by the House, came to the Senate floor. The stonewalling lasted 60 days, including seven Saturdays, until a coalition of 44 Democrats and 29 Republicans voted for cloture, ending the filibuster. The Senate passed the bill nine days later. On July 2, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the House too, and was signed into law by President Johnson that same day.

Fifty years later, there are a lot of reasons to reconnect the dots between the Civil Rights Act, the Wilderness Act, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Friends of mine--Rue Mapp at Outdoor Afro, José González at Latino Outdoors, and Carolyn Finney, a professor at UC Berkeley and author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, among many others--are making these connections real in their work today. The arc of the history in which these three pieces of legislation represented signal turning points is long and still unfinished.

For me, a keyword in this history is "untrammeled." The word is at the center of the Wilderness Act, which states: "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

The author of that passage, Howard Zahniser, had been searching for just the right word as he was drafting the act for the Wilderness Society. When a friend used "untrammeled" to describe the ocean, Zahniser liked it immediately. Some of his colleagues worried that the word was too poetic and would associate the act with the "daffodil" wing of the conservation movement. "Undisturbed" was better, they argued.

But according to biographer Mark Harvey, Zahniser "thought that 'undisturbed' was inaccurate, given that many proposed wilderness area had already been altered by mining, grazing, and other uses." Zahniser liked the capaciousness and flexibility of "untrammeled," which he took to mean "free, unbound, unhampered, unchecked."

"Unshackled" is another synonym. With "untrammeled," Zahniser reached deep into American ideas of freedom for a term that would liberate the land. In doing so, consciously or not, he also linked the wilderness ideal to the greatest battle for freedom in American history, the Civil War, and the next chapter, as President Johnson called it, the civil rights movement of his own times.

In The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics Since 1964, historian James Morton Turner argues that the Wilderness Act, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and the Civil Rights Act were also connected by a shared belief in what at the time was called the Great Society. The last 50 years have been hard on the Great Society and especially on the core idea that government plays a crucial role not only in guaranteeing our freedoms but also in providing for shared social goods, such as clean water and public lands.

I wouldn't want to go back to 1964. But I would like to visit that foreign country today to recover a few things we seem to have left behind. One is the historical complexity of "untrammeled," which has, unfortunately, come to mean something too close to "undisturbed," an idea too pure and simple for our times. The other is the understanding that the work of politics is the essential work of a creating a great society, which is always unfinished.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund, which has been underused woefully for many years, will be shut down completely next year if it is not reauthorized by Congress. The Sacramento Bee published an op-ed today that I wrote with Graham Chisholm, the California coordinator for the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition. I have an interview with Rue Mapp and Carolyn Finney in the fall issue of Boom: A Journal of California. The photo above is by Noa Batle, an incoming freshman at UCLA, and is from the cover of that issue.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 8:06 PM | Permalink

The cascades in Sylmar. LA Observed photo.

By Josh Sides

Southern Californians are atwitter about their lawns, but the California State Water Board's new regulation, forbidding a whole host of wasteful practices, is long overdue. Also long overdue is the $500 fine for violating the new regulation, though some are already decrying these efforts as an intrusion of the so-called "Nanny State." But surely critics would agree that a $500 fine is preferable to being shamed, jailed, exiled, or even executed for their wastefulness. And yet, those are some of the precise punishments visited upon water wasters in the history of California.

Before Europeans arrived here, Native Californians raised no livestock nor did they cultivate any major crops, and the size of their population was close to that of modern-day Stockton. And yet, they were profoundly aware of the region's water scarcity. In addition to performing elaborate ceremonies invoking rain, they also viewed water wasters with deep contempt. In their "enemy songs," for example, the Cahuilla of Southern California taunted their enemies in hydrological terms: "In the middle of the desert lands, lying on his back . . . his food gave out, his water gave out." More to the point, the Gabrielinos exiled, and sometimes executed, community leaders who mismanaged water and food supplies. Southern California natives used tar deposits to carefully seal their water vessels for maximum efficiency, and the practice was more than one of convenience: It was one of survival.

When the Spanish arrived in 1769, they utterly transformed the natural landscape of California, introducing large-scale agricultural cultivation, primitive irrigation systems, and livestock raising. It was their production of beef, in particular, that set California on a new and dangerous path toward the overconsumption of water. The state's native coastal grasses had long ago adapted to drought, but they were no match for vast herds of grazing cattle. The death of thousands of head of Mission cattle during the drought years of 1809 and 1820 apparently imparted no lessons to the Mexicans Californios, who won their independence from Spain in 1821.

Rather than diversifying their agricultural production, becoming less reliant on the American and European trade in hides and tallow, or significantly altering their own diets and customs, the Californios, instead, doubled-down on cattle. They vastly expanded grazing pasturage, even in dry years, because the money was good. Indeed, the Californio cattle barons of the 1830s and 1840s achieved a level of material comfort and prominence that would have been unimaginable in Mexico proper. But they paid a heavy cost - hidden at first - in water: collectively, the Californios and the incoming Americans owned 1.2 million head of cattle by 1860, each of which drank about 20 gallons a day on average. For some perspective, that's roughly equivalent to the DWP rupture at UCLA, occurring every single day. And that doesn't include the water required to grow the feed, alfalfa — which, then and now, is one of the state's largest and most water intensive crops.

The Californios (and their American ranchero imitators) did not fully appreciate the high price of their lifestyle until the devastating drought years of 1862-1864. The drought killed off at least 20% of their herd, decimating the main pillar of the livestock economy at the very moment Californios were being subjected to racist practices that would soon relegate them to the bottom rungs of California's new socioeconomic ladder. Meanwhile, Anglo newcomers to the state scooped up water where they could. Wildly successful enterprises like the Miller and Lux cattle company secured rights to entire rivers, and mid-level players formed conglomerates that allowed them to irrigate the Central Valley, which soon became the breadbasket of the nation.

But it was the homesteaders of California, the forgotten strivers, who evinced the first serious understanding of water scarcity, and the very modest lifestyle these circumstances engendered. More than 58,000 Americans and recent immigrants claimed land in California under President Lincoln's landmark 1862 Homestead Act, granting one hundred and sixty acres to any man or woman willing to "prove up" the land over five years by building a house and making nominal improvements. There were more than three thousand homesteading families in Los Angeles County, most of whom claimed land between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on the fringes of the city, in the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains, and in the Antelope Valley. For these families, one hundred and sixty acres could be as burdensome as it was bountiful. Though many failed, many more subsisted as small farmers, producing a variety of crops to sustain themselves, often with a few bushels left over to sell at local markets. As the records of the Los Angeles courts (housed at the Huntington Library) reveal, the homesteaders of Los Angeles often died with little more than their land. But they could say something most Angelenos, both then and now, couldn't say: they understood water.

They understood water because its absence circumscribed their endeavors and their comfort, and they persisted in rationing, even into the era of the Owens Valley Aqueduct, when most Angelenos thoughtlessly planted lawns en-masse. Out in the hinterlands, the homesteaders had no appetite for superficial amenities like green grass. More to the point, the adjudication of competing claims to water rights kept them in check. For example, when an irrigation district in the Antelope Valley tried to sue San Gabriel mountain homesteader Abram Shoemaker and his son in 1893 for slaking off too much water from Big Rock Creek before it flowed into the irrigation district, Superior Court Judge (and future California Supreme Justice) Lucien Shaw ruled that the Shoemaker's had as much right to take water from the Creek as the irrigation district did. After roughly calculating what the Shoemakers needed to survive, he set very precise limits on what they could consume. They were allowed one hundred and fifty inches of water under four inch pressure for ten days per month in April, May, June, July, and August and then the same amount for 3-4 days a month in September, October, November, and then none from December through March, meaning that they would have ration and store their supply. The Shoemakers could comply or face jail time. They chose the former.

Judge Shaw was no hydrologist; he simply understood what the indigenous people of California did. First, rationing was essential, even in wet years. Second, punishment, rather than voluntary compliance, was always more effective in producing behaviors appropriate to the realities of the regional environment. Today, we've been spoiled by the Owens Valley aqueduct, spoiled by the Colorado River, and spoiled by the promises of our turf fertilizers. We deserve a stiff punishment.


Josh Sides is a professor of history at California State University Northridge and a current Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library.

Posted by Josh Sides at 8:53 AM | Permalink

Jon Christensen writes: Los Angeles just can't shake "Chinatown." No matter how many times we're told the movie is pure myth and has next to nothing to do with our actual history, "Chinatown" continues to have the pull of an irresistible current, especially when it comes to thinking about water in LA.

A great movie, to be sure, with a great script by Robert Towne, great directing by Roman Polanski, great acting by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston, and an enduring myth of the original sin that made modern Los Angeles possible, taking water from the Owens Valley--but can "Chinatown" help us think about water in Los Angeles in any constructive way today, in the midst of a historic drought?

Surprisingly, perhaps, yes. Digging such practical lessons out of a fictional masterpiece of cinema was not foremost on my mind when I moderated a conversation on "Chinatown, Revisited" at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County recently with Patt Morrison from the LA Times, Jim McDaniel from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Lauren Bon from the Metabolic Studio, and artist Rob Reynolds.

I'm more interested in the way that the myth operates as myth to convey the simple truth that there is no escaping the past. For me, the nonfictional lesson in that for us today is that we must bear the responsibility of the history that enabled our present. If we define our watershed expansively, as where our water comes from in LA, Owens Valley is part of our watershed, so is the Colorado River, and the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers in Northern California. We have responsibility for their wellbeing as well as our own. We can't run from that.

Rob Reynolds ties this myth and reality together in his exhibition "Just Add Water" at the Natural History Museum. His large-scale watercolors include historical and contemporary scenes from along the 233 miles of the Los Angeles Aqueduct that brings water from Owens Valley to the city, as well as a scene from "Chinatown." But there is a part of the exhibition that Reynolds said was even more intense for him to produce: a banner with the names of thousands of people who worked on the aqueduct, who farmed and ranched in Owens Valley and lost their water, who participated in protests along the aqueduct. They are joined with the names of people who lost their lives in the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, built by aqueduct engineer William Mulholland, who uttered the famous line "There it is, take it," when the aqueduct first brought water to LA on November 5, 1913.

A year ago, Lauren Bon and the Metabolic Studio marked the centennial of the aqueduct by riding its entire length with a 100-mule packtrain. Bon said mules were an essential part of the workforce that built the aqueduct and thus Los Angeles, and they have continued to be an important workforce in Owens Valley and the Sierra Nevada. The journey was a way to explore and revitalize the historical connections between the city and its source of water in what Bon calls "the delta of Mount Whitney," while searching for new ways to understand and be responsible for our extended watershed in the next century.

I thought of the mules again when Bon later briefly alluded to a scene early in "Chinatown" when a shepherd brings a flock of sheep into city hall to protest a hearing on a flawed dam, which evokes the historic St. Francis Dam disaster. Bon said we can all make our voices heard, at the very least, by voting, but also by acting creatively to bring attention to the often invisible histories, connections, and responsibilities that make it possible for us to turn on a tap and have clean drinking water flow reliably into our cups.

The Department of Water and Power has been tremendously successful in making it possible for us to take that fact for granted. But that has to change, said Patt Morrison, who had the most dramatic suggestion for how to make Angelenos pay attention to water: turn it off, she said. Not for good, but just for a few hours a day from time to time, she said, much like rolling electricity brownouts. If people turn the tap and nothing comes out, they might get the message that freeway signs have so far failed to deliver: this is a precious, limited resource, folks!

Morrison's suggestion also harkened back to the manufactured water shortages that "Chinatown" suggests were used to drive the water grab at the heart of the movie. Historians debate whether there is any basis for this plot element in fact, like virtually everything else in the movie.

Jim McDaniel, who is in charge of all water operations at the LA Department of Water and Power, delivering water to 3.9 million Angelenos, chuckled at the idea, but quickly noted that it would go against everything that water engineers spend their lives trying to ensure. The LADWP will continue to rely on imported water, he said, even as it works to capture and reuse more water locally, and encourages people to conserve water. But making sure that water never stops flowing will remain its top priority.

And just so, we are left with the paradox that our modern water systems have made it not only possible, but virtually inevitable, that we should forget where our water comes from and the responsibilities it carries. Myth and art may be our best ways back into that understanding.

Reminder: Our "Just Add Water: The Discussions" series at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County continues this Thursday evening, July 31, with a conversation on "Water Wars" and the people and struggles that have made our water systems cleaner, healthier, safer for all, from Mono Lake to South and East LA, with panelists Mark Gold, acting director of UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability; Elsa Lopez, public affairs manager for the Water Replenishment District of Southern California; Mary Pardo, professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge, and Ed Reyes, former Los Angeles City Council member. To RSVP, visit the museum website here. The "Just Add Water" series is presented in conjunction with the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA and Boom: A Journal of California.

Check out Boom's special issue on the LA Aqueduct here, including an article on fact and fiction in "Chinatown."

Images from "Chinatown," Paramount Pictures, 1974. Photo by Evelyn Wendel.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 7:14 PM | Permalink

Andy McCue has devoted a good chunk of his life to working on a biography of one of baseball's most important, and perhaps, most divisive figures, Walter O'Malley. His book, Mover and Shaker: Walter O'Malley, the Dodgers, and Baseball's Westward Expansion, came out from the University of Nebraska Press on May 1, although it was available in April in Kindle format, which is how I read it while vacationing in Denmark (where Dodger games were not blacked out on MLB.tv.)

The most important difference between McCue's book and Michael D'Antonio's Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O'Malley (2009, Riverhead) is that McCue's work did not receive any cooperation from the O'Malley family, while D'Antonio received the family's imprimatur.

A good chunk of the book, as you would expect, covers the Dodgers move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, which ends up telling you a lot about the political culture in New York in the 1950s and how politics in Los Angeles and California has always been, for lack of a better phrase, somewhat confusing.

Since I'm a friend of Andy's and listed in the acknowledgments, I don't feel right in doing a review of the book, but I will link you to Paul Dickson's review of the book in the Wall Street Journal.

Continue reading "Newest O'Malley bio looks deeper at the move from Brooklyn to L.A." »

Posted by Bob Timmermann at 4:06 PM | Permalink

Jon Christensen writes: Artist Lauren Bon has won approval from the LA City Council to build an enormous water wheel on the LA River near downtown. The 70-foot-tall steel wheel will lift water from the river for use in the neighborhood around Bon's Metabolic Studio between the Spring Street bridge and Los Angeles State Historic Park. Bon will be discussing the project in a public conversation on March 22, World Water Day, in Lincoln Heights.

Bon named the project "La Noria," after the Spanish word for water wheel. In the late nineteenth century, there were as many as nine norias in the area along the "zanja madre," or mother ditch, the principal canal carrying water from the river to nearby vineyards and farms. The new water wheel will take 35 million gallons of water each year from the river for neighborhood parks and gardens.

Bon talks of "bending the river back into the city" with this iconic, high profile project, which was endorsed by Mayor Eric Garcetti last fall. "The idea of connecting the river to the land and to once again rely on the river for beneficial use, even on a small-scale, is at the heart of the city's Los Angeles River policy," he said. "The water wheel will be the first and perhaps the most visually dramatic project implemented by that policy."

An inflatable dam in the river will back water up high enough to enter an opening that will be punched in the side of the river's current concrete channel. Water will then flow in a pipe and channel to turn the wheel, which will be built between the Broadway and Spring Street bridges next to Metabolic Studio. The wheel will lift the water from the level of the river to ground level. And from there, the water will be distributed around the neighborhood. The estimated $10 million cost of the project will be covered by Metabolic Studio, which is a project of the Annenberg Foundation, where Bon serves as a trustee.

The project cleared a key hurdle Wednesday when the city council voted unanimously to approve a finding that the water wheel would not have a significant environmental impact under the California Environmental Quality Act. Metabolic Studio hopes to break ground on the project this summer pending additional permit approvals.

"Unusual and delightful," is how Deborah Weintraub, LA's interim chief engineer, who is overseeing environmental approvals for the project, described the water wheel in the Los Angeles Daily News last week. "It's essentially a piece of art that's taking water out of the river."

"This is so much more than just an art project," city council member Mitch O'Farrell said at the hearing before Wednesday's vote. "This is a demonstration with practical uses that will deliver water to the new state park and other public properties."

The wheel "will put water that would simply end up in the ocean to good use here in the city," added council member Paul Koretz. "As we're in the process of freeing the river from its concrete shoes, I'm thrilled to see Metabolic Studio's water wheel project leading the way to bring it artfully back to life."

The Metabolic Studio sees the water wheel as even more than all of that. "La Noria" is described by the studio as one of its "devices of wonder"--projects that combine art with work in communities and with government agencies and other institutions in artistic practices and social processes that have "a catalytic and transformative effect on the brownfields" in which the studio operates. Bon hopes that the water wheel project will have the power not only to bring water from the LA River back into the city, but also to inspire broader conversations and changes in the economics and distribution of water in Los Angeles, the state of California, and the wider American West.

Lauren Bon, Deborah Weintraub, and Miguel Luna will discuss "La Noria" and "bending the river back into the city" in a public conversation at the Lincoln Heights Senior Citizen Center at 23 Workman Street on March 22 from 11am to 1pm. For information about this World Water Day event, contact info@metabolicstudio.org or Jill Sourial at (213) 926-4785.

Images courtesy of Metabolic Studio, top to bottom: Historic Los Angeles water wheel, map of water wheels on the zanja madre with the new water wheel's location in red, an early sketch of the new water wheel, a current model of the new water wheel, aerial view of the new water wheel's location.

Disclosure: Jon Christensen has collaborated with Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio on events around the LA Aqueduct and the future of water in Los Angeles, and the studio supported a special issue of Boom: A Journal of California, which he edits, on the aqueduct's centenary.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 10:24 AM | Permalink

The talk was billed as "L.A. Stories: Gary Snyder." And it brought a crowd to the LA Public Library late Friday afternoon to hear the grand old man of the Beat generation. But the real showstopper was our own Lewis MacAdams, the poet laureate of the LA River.

MacAdams said he came downtown just to "listen to Gary" at "Tales from Two Cities: Stories from California," a conference put together by USC historian Bill Deverell, LA Times book critic David Ulin, and William Randolph Hearst III. A San Francisco version of the conference took place in the fall. Both are now online at Fora.tv, a venture backed by Hearst.

Snyder proceeded to tell the long story of his friendship with MacAdams, dating from the time they did a poetry performance for Greenpeace in the late 1960s. Those were the days, Snyder reminisced, when "we tried to save the world by giving poetry readings and selling cookies."

A few years later, Snyder said, MacAdams told him that he and some artist friends had decided to "cheer up the Los Angeles River." They "read poems to it, sang to it, danced for it, and here's the important point," Snyder remembered, "Lewis asked permission of the river to speak on its behalf to the human beings. And, I presume, he got it."

The rest is history, the history of Friends of the Los Angeles River, which Snyder recounted in a very loose fashion, saying to MacAdams, who was in the audience, "Lewis, you can correct me if I'm really badly off. But if it's just a minor mistake, don't bother."

Snyder read his own poem "Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin" from his book-length Mountains and Rivers Without End, a surprisingly contemplative take on the city, comparing the night lights of LA freeways to calligraphy, and goldfish rising to feed in a pond to the "churn and roil" of fame in the city's star-making machinery.

Then Snyder invited MacAdams on stage to read his poem "The Voice of the River." MacAdams introduced the poem by noting that he had heard that a plaque by the river with a fragment of the poem is now covered in graffiti.

"I told myself, 'Welcome to LA,' once again," he said, and then launched into a full-throated reading of a poem that hears "the "I-5, the 110, the L.B.," "the screeching metal" of a Metrolink commuter train, "news choppers" overhead, and "the howling ambulance sirens followed by the coyote pack's howl," "the River singing through the passing railroad cars," "the scream of a fishhawk, the flapping of a hundred pigeons," and "a Great Blue Heron's sorrowful honk."

"The Voice of the River" also hears the numbing language of "the endless meetings, always one or two more, the laptops clicking, the TMDL's, the BMP's, the RFP's, the SSO's and the UAA's; the murmuring bureaucrats, the sharp whack of gavels, the deep voice of command."

Still, as MacAdams wrote and read aloud, ultimately bringing the house down: "At the center of itself / the River is silence, / and that's where I come in: / with the sounds in my head / and the words in my heart."

Photo by Gary Leonard.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 7:24 PM | Permalink

Couple of fixes down below - ed.

Fred Eaton was the man behind the plan for the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a man-made river of water that was completed 100 years ago on November 5, 1913. It took him several years to convince his good friend William Mulholland to build an aqueduct from Inyo County to L.A. Eaton knew that the Los Angeles River could not supply enough water for the exploding soon-to-be metropolis. That's because Eaton was born in L.A., unlike Mulholland, who arrived as an Irish immigrant in 1877, and knew little of the periodic droughts inevitable to the town built along the river. Although Mulholland later called him "the father of the Aqueduct," Eaton is barely a blip in the memory of long-time residents.

Eaton was born in Los Angeles in 1855 on Fort Moore Hill, overlooking the Plaza. It was bounded roughly by today's Spring Street, Hill Street, and Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. He would oversee much of the city's water supply during the 1870s. Eaton was the city's first elected City Engineer, during which time he developed several of the city's parks, which still exist today. He was later elected Mayor and led the often contentious, lengthy and eventual successful legal battle to bring municipal ownership to the water supply of the L.A. River. And, of course, he was intimately involved in bringing Owens River water to Los Angeles via the California Aqueduct.

In many ways Eaton was, to quote Orson Welles, "a man who had within him the devil of self-destruction that lives in every genius." Although many writers compare Mulholland's rough-edged childhood with that of Eaton's more patrician background, in many ways they were similar. Both loved camping and exploring the Sierra Nevada range. Both men were fascinated with water: its power as essential to the lifeblood of the city, and a plentiful supply of it to quench the thirst of an ever-growing city. Mulholland was often imperious. So was Eaton. Both men enjoyed the social company of men in fraternal organizations. But Eaton was more of a politician, and Eaton loved to engage in public debate. He also had a wicked sense of humor that he rarely demonstrated unless within the confines of his family.

As an adult Eaton was a Radical Republican, promoted Civil War reconstruction and was intimately involved with development of city parks, roads and sewers both in Los Angeles and Santa Monica. He made a second home in Santa Monica away from the demands of the ever-growing city that would eventually become a metropolis.

Eaton's father was Judge Benjamin Eaton, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1853 and shortly afterward became the city's district attorney. He subsequently served as county assessor in 1857. Benjamin later moved to San Pasqual, the area now known as Pasadena and is most widely acknowledged as the founding father of Pasadena, South Pasadena and Altadena. One of Pasadena's main streets, Fair Oaks Boulevard, takes its name from Eaton's large ranch home that he built in 1865 not far from Eaton Creek. Judge Eaton brought irrigation to vineyards in the area; and, at the time, a revolutionary method of using iron pipes to bring water supply to the area. He was also instrumental in the development of the Mount Wilson Toll Road in 1891. Several distinctive spots including Eaton Canyon, Eaton Wash, and Eaton Falls bear his name.

Fred was five when his father left for San Pasqual with his second wife, after Fred's mother died. Fred remained in Los Angeles and lived with his relatively wealthy aunt and uncle in Los Angeles. Despite the absence of his father, who had begun a new family with his second wife, Fred Eaton was deeply influenced by his father's work with water and his reputation as a leading citizen of Los Angeles.

Fred Eaton began his water career with the Los Angeles Water Company, a privately owned company that supplied the city with water, brought, by various methods, from the Los Angeles River. He became the company's superintendent in 1874 when he was only nineteen years old. A few years later he hired William Mulholland, who arrived in the city in 1877 as a zanjero (ditch digger), but then quickly moved up in the company under Fred's tutelage.

Fred Eaton became active in progressive politics in the city. After serving an appointed term as City Surveyor, precursor to the elected office of City Engineer, Fred Eaton, the only candidate, was declared by acclamation the city's first City Engineer. During his two-year tenure from 1887-1889, he redesigned and renovated present day Pershing Square--first known as 6th Street Park, later Central Park, and finally renamed in honor of General Pershing, a WWI hero. Other parks he designed included Elysian Park, the second largest and oldest park in Los Angeles founded in 1886 by the Elysian Park Enabling Ordinance.

The predecessor to Pershing Square as designed by Eaton.

He designed Westlake Park (later renamed in honor of General MacArthur). He also designed the Plaza, a park that had been built by the privately owned L.A. Water Company under an agreement with the city to improve the site. But it wasn't until Eaton became city engineer that the Plaza became a true park, a popular site that included fountains and grass, all of which are no longer there. His design for the park added a bandstand, and the square soon became a meeting ground and cultural center for the town's ascendant Anglo population. Fred also developed Eastlake Park with an artificial lake. Eastlake was later renamed Lincoln Park under Mayor Hazard, who served as mayor from 1889 to 1892-- the year that Fred Eaton left the City Engineer's office to pursue other business interests.

Fred Eaton's major achievement while City Engineer, however, may have been his design of a new sewer system for the city, as well as a twelve and-a-half mile sewage outfall to the ocean that would carry the city's sewage fully by gravity. Voters paid for the internal system, but balked at paying for an outfall for sewage that was then a valuable asset. Sewage was sold to farmers until 1907, and, after expenses and salaries were subtracted, profits ranged from $1,500 to $5,200 a year. Despite what would appear to be an overwhelming yuck factor, sewage farms throughout Southern California operated until well into the late 1940s when suburban development pushed out farmers operating the plants. These farms were primarily used for walnut trees and other non-vegetable products.

Eaton purchased a home on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica in 1891 and retained homes there until 1904, when he permanently moved to Inyo County. While in Santa Monica he led the campaign for a paved road from Santa Monica to Los Angeles to accommodate bicycle riders. He also designed a sewer system for the city as well as the wharf for the sewer to the ocean. The wharf was the later site of the present day Santa Monica Pier.

Eaton had visited Inyo County several times with his father when he was younger. Later, in 1892, he visited Owens Valley on a camping trip with friends where he made an extensive study of land and water resources. It was at this time that he became convinced that the Owens River could provide water via an aqueduct to Los Angeles. Eaton developed his plans for an aqueduct much earllier than is generally believed.

He described these plans in an interview published In the July 7, 1892 Riverside Press. "I saw more water going to waste than is contained in all he streams and rivers of San Bernardino, San Diego and Los Angeles Counties combined," he said. Eaton insisted it would be almost impossible to divert the water to San Francisco. He then outlined his plan to divert Owens River Water and conduct it to Los Angeles. "I propose to devote all of my energies to this great enterprise. It must come to Los Angeles, for it has not other outlet."

Shortly after he purchased land in Inyo, in October 1893, he attended the National Irrigation Congress held in Los Angeles as a representative from Inyo, while his father Benjamin Eaton was there as a representative from Pasadena.

Several years later he recalled, "My idea was to organize a strong company which should develop the great water power of the streams which pour down from the High Sierra and then combine with the electric feature, bringing the water to the San Fernando Valley. From the sale of the electricity and water I was satisfied the project would be an inviting one." Eventually he was persuaded that the project could not be a joint pubic-private enterprise and enthusiastically assisted the city in obtaining options for land and water rights in Inyo County.

In addition to his residences in Inyo and Santa Monica, Fred Eaton retained a home in Los Angeles. While serving as the city's mayor in 1899, he fought for city ownership of the water from the Los Angeles River. Primary spokesperson and leader of prominent businessmen, he headed up a committee of 100 for passage of a $2,090,000 bond measure to pay for the acquisition of the water company's rights. It received the largest vote ever cast in Los Angeles at a special election with two-thirds of the vote needed for passage. While mayor, Eaton led a series of battles for civic betterment: efforts to reform the city charter; ensured strict enforcement of civil service laws in the city, crusaded against unsavory activity of saloons that were used by women; desegregated the fire department (re-segregated by the mayor who followed him); attempted unsuccessfully to shut down slot machine activity, and in an echo to his days as city engineer, in 1900 led a successful fight to prohibit sale of sewage water to Chinese farmers who were using the sewage for vegetable and fruit crops grown both within and outside the city limits.

While Eaton was mayor, he created the Los Angeles Water Department, forerunner of the Department of Water and Power, and announced his plans to appoint William Mulholland as superintendent and Chief Engineer, who was then heading up the private L.A. Water Company.

It would be decades before Eaton convinced Mulholland of the need to bring water to Los Angeles from Inyo County. He knew that the L.A. River, with its periodic droughts, could not sustain the city's growth. Mulholland scoffed at the idea of bringing water from Inyo to Los Angeles.

This was particularly true in July 1900 while Eaton was mayor. F. H. Newell, chief hydrographer of the United States, and J. B. Lippincott, then a government hydrographer of the district in the Sierra Nevada joined Eaton and his son Harold on a hunting and camping trip to the summit of the Sierra. They were later joined by William Mulholland. Although they supposedly did not discuss plans for an aqueduct, all four men would later be embroiled in the controversy over the 1905 decision by Los Angeles to build the aqueduct.

The aqueduct story is far too complicated to summarize in this short essay,* but one point must be noted. William Mulholland and Fred Eaton had a terrible breach in their friendship. Eaton had purchased several thousand acres of ranch land in Inyo County, some on behalf of the city and some for his own use. He retained a large parcel for a reservoir to be built in Long Valley to hold water during the inevitable drought that would face L.A. It's never been quite clear how much money he wanted for this land, but all accounts suggest it was about $1 million, a hefty sum that would have set up Fred and his family for a long time. Mulholland was appalled. He was convinced that L.A. did not need a reservoir, just as he had been convinced years earlier that the L.A. River was sufficient for a population of one million. But this time he was angry and publicly announced that Eaton was attempting to unfairly profit from what was a civic venture. He refused to pay and vowed that L.A. would not go over his head. Mulholland then was in total control of the city's Department of Water and Power. Business and civic leaders shared his opinion.

Eaton was insistent. After all, when he first conceived of the aqueduct, he planned on a combined public-privately owned operation. City officials convinced him that the Department of Reclamation would not approve anything but a purely public venture, so he agreed. But he never let go of his dream of wealth. Even so, in the late 1920s, according to Hal Eaton, Fred's great-grandson, "Fred wanted the City to acquire the reservoir site through eminent domain or arbitration instead of stating his price."

When one looks at Eaton's time in Los Angeles, it is clear that he, like Mulholland, was an obstinate man. He relished public debates. Often wrote lengthy articles defending various positions he held to be true. Upon leaving office as mayor, in 1900, he wrote a 14,000-word article for a local newspaper that laid out all the many details of the Los Angeles Water Company's repeated illegal activities and unfair dealing with the city. After completion of the aqueduct in 1913, he also may have been upset upon noting the prominent businessmen--Moses Sherman, Harrison Gray Otis, his son-in-law Harry Chandler, E.H. Harriman, and H. E. Huntington among others--who profited greatly from vast land purchases in the San Fernando Valley (laying the foundation for the myth that became the movie Chinatown.

Despite the strange, so-called retelling of the Inyo County water deal in the now classic movie Chinatown, which set the story in the 1930s, there was no conspiracy to wrest the water rights from Inyo County. There was, however a concerted effort on the part of Los Angeles to obtain the water rights.

Fred Eaton suffered the first of several strokes in 1926, and by 1931, had become enfeebled in both mind and body. A receiver foreclosed his land in Inyo County in 1932 after he was unable to pay a mortgage that had apparently been signed by his wife. The mortgage was unpaid because the Watterson Brothers, who owned all five banks in Inyo County, embezzled funds, including money owned by the Eatons, and all mortgages became the property of receivers. The Inyo county bankers were convicted of their crime and went to prison for ten years. That was of no help to Eaton and his family. Both Eaton's wife Alice and son Henry [fixed-ed.] publicly announced their poverty in 1932 and need for public welfare. Fred Eaton died in 1934 in Los Angeles, pretty much a forgotten man.

He designed and built a world-class sewer system. He built the parks we still use. He fought for and won the battle to make the L.A. River a municipally owned utility. He envisioned and shared his vision of a river of water to build a metropolis. But he is remembered, if at all, as a villain, who attempted to profit from a mighty public venture.
Special thanks to Hal Eaton, Fred Eaton's great-grandson who generously shared family stories, links to publications, and photos for this article.

A version of this article ran first in the newsletter of the Los Angeles City Historical Society.

Anna Sklar is the author of Brown Acres: An Intimate History of the Los Angeles Sewers published by Angel City Press.

Posted by Anna Sklar at 11:48 PM | Permalink

So this is it. November 5 is the big day, marking a century since water first cascaded from the Los Angeles Aqueduct into the San Fernando Valley in Sylmar.

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is organizing a re-enactment of the opening 100 years ago when chief engineer William Mulholland famously proclaimed: "There it is. Take it." There will not be thousands of citizens at this event, as there were a century ago. The ceremony is by invitation only this time. And, really, we kind of take our water for granted now anyway, don't we? It's hard to imagine thousands of Angelenos trekking all the way across the valley to celebrate water today.

So the next evening, civic leaders will gather at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary on November 6, for a "civic ceremony" at the Exposition Park fountain at 5:30 p.m. The ceremony is open to the public and will include the creation of a time capsule to be opened 100 years from now in LA 2113. The leaders will then retire to the museum for an exclusive cocktail party and "taste of history" 1913-era dinner, with water, no doubt, from the aqueduct.

It will be interesting to see what they choose to include as markers of our time in the capsule. We're crowd-sourcing suggestions of our own over at Boom: A Journal of California and on the magazine's Facebook page and @boomcalifornia on Twitter using the hashtag #LA2113.

Not all of the centenary celebrations are so exclusive. "Just Add Water," an exhibition of large-scale watercolor paintings by L.A.-based artist Rob Reynolds is opening at the Natural History Museum on Tuesday and admission to the museum will be free that day and the next from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The watercolors reference key sites along the aqueduct's 233-mile route and moments throughout its 100-year history. The museum will also give away a special memento, a vial of water for the occasion, and visitors can add their names to the time capsule.

A different kind of party will take place on the evening of November 6 at Stetson Ranch Park in Sylmar, where 100 mules that have been making a commemorative trek along the LA Aqueduct will be corralled for the night. The Metabolic Studio is throwing a party for the mule wranglers, to celebrate Boom's current special issue on the aqueduct, and for the public to meet the crew, and especially the hardworking mules. The mules are symbolically carrying all that it would take to begin to build from scratch a new city for a new century, much as mules and human labor and ingenuity built the aqueduct a hundred years ago.

This turn from looking back to looking forward will be marked by another exhibition opening at the Bridge Gallery in Los Angeles City Hall on November 6. "Aqueduct Futures" was created by Barry Lehrman and Jonathan Links with 130 students from Cal Poly Pomona who designed solutions to enhance the resilience and adaptability of our aging water infrastructure and establish a road map to peace between Los Angeles and Owens Valley.

It's about time.

There is a lot of movement to heal the relationship between Los Angeles and Owens Valley. We've come a long way from "There it is. Take it." Mono Lake is on the mend. Revitalization of the Owens River is underway. But there is still no clear path to a consensus solution for Owens Lake, where 95,000 acre-feet of water a year -- a substantial portion of the water supply from Owens Valley -- is currently being used to keep down dust and create watery habitat for migrating birds on the dry lakebed, where the Owens River once spilled into the Great Basin desert. That habitat is another sign of healing. But the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is still at odds with the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District, which regulates air quality and dust control.

All of this history is worth observing, reflecting on, and commemorating. And when a peace agreement is finally signed at Owens Lake, we'll really have cause for celebration.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 3:24 PM | Permalink

Today is Dorothy Parker's 120th birthday. She was born on August 22, 1893, and her devotees shall observe the occasion by posting her quotations and poems on the Internets. However, a famous quip about Los Angeles may not be applicable.

As the president of the LA Chapter of the Dorothy Parker Society and tour guide, I am asked on a regular basis if Dorothy Parker actually said that Los Angeles is "72 of suburbs in search of a city." The answer is...probably not.

The quote has been attributed to Dorothy Parker but it's really a paraphrase of Aldous Huxley's bon mot found his 1925 book, Americana. He wrote that Los Angeles was "nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis" and he was probably quoting someone else who initially said Los Angeles was seven or six suburbs in search of a city. The witticism expanded from there. At times it was attributed to H.L. Menken, Robert Benchely, Alexander Woolcott and Dorothy Parker.

Most likely it was Mencken who used the phrase in an essay published in the April 1927 issue of Photoplay magazine after visiting Los Angeles for three weeks in 1926. I cannot find the actual essay so I must reserve the right to be wrong. Thanks to Kim Cooper, I have found the publication online. But I still reserve the right to be wrong.

Regardless, Mrs. Parker's hatred for our fair city inspired plenty of other waspish quips.
I can verify that she once told a reporter that she loathed palm trees, calling them "the ugliest vegetable God created." You can tweet that.

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 12:38 AM | Permalink

Poppy Cannon-Reese gives a fast tour of the Universal Studios Costume Department. Universal video

Color photos by Judy Graeme. Click any photo to enlarge

When Poppy Cannon-Reese became manager of the Universal Studios Costume Department two years ago, she already had an insider's knowledge of the warehouse-like place. During her long career as a costume designer and stylist for commercials and feature films, Cannon-Reese had been a frequent client, routinely making Universal the first stop of her day. "Because it's open at seven in the morning, before the stores open, you can come here and get a fix on what you need and get organized.....like if you have to dress a bunch of guys walking down the street in flannel shirts and jeans, we have all that," she says. Almost anything that is required to create the look of a character can be found there — more than a million pieces from monster masks to cowboy hats in many sizes are available for rental.

Universal's costume department takes up the whole fourth floor of the Edith Head Building.

The department, which dates to when Universal opened as a studio in 1915, occupies an entire floor of the Edith Head Building on the lot. Items cater to all kinds of productions, including feature films, television, commercials and music videos. The Universal Costume Department is on the circuit of essential resources that Hollywood costumers rely on, along with Western Costume in North Hollywood, the Warner Brothers costume department in Burbank and Palace Costume in West Hollywood.

Cannon-Reese already knew everyone in the department when she arrived, including her predecessor, Larry Harnell, who retired after 46 years. When the job opened up, she says it was "like a bolt of lightning. I knew I needed to apply! I was excited about the possibilities and what I could do. Our clients are basically people who shop all day long, so my goal is to make them as comfortable as they are at Neiman Marcus or Bloomingdales. If you can speed up anybody's day by making it easier, that's my goal."

The Costume Department, she says, is like a giant closet. "You have to know what you can keep and what to get rid of. We edit periodically and donate to charitable organizations." She oversees a staff of 18, including dressmaker John Hayles, who worked with Marilyn Monroe early in his career. (All are members of Costumers Union Local 705.) They service costumers and stylists all day, including A-list Hollywood designers such as Colleen Atwood, Marlene Stewart and Sanja Hays. She finds them fun to work with because they "have a strong point of view, and a strong sense of what they are looking for. Plus, their personal styles are always fascinating. They always know exactly what they want."

Since the closet always gets full, Cannon-Reese and her staff are always on the lookout for pieces to send to the Universal archive located in Sunland. They recently found Tippi Hedren's dress from Alfred Hitchcock's "Marni," Michelle Pfeiffers dress from "Scarface," and Marlon Brando's costume pattern from "Mutiny on the Bounty." "Once something goes to archive it never gets worn again," she said.

The Costume Department has also recently been added to the Universal Studios Hollywood VIP Experience tour. This tour, unlike the one most visitors take, is conducted in small groups and includes more work-a-day, hidden areas like sound stages and the props warehouse. "I think it's really important for us to be on the tour...for visitors to the lot to see the costumes because to me there's a magic, an inherent value and beauty," says Cannon-Reese. "I love my clients and the stylists but in some ways it's as important to show the public the glamour of the film industry in person — where you can actually be right there with it and touch it. I think we give them a really good look behind the scenes."

The Universal costume department circa 1916, courtesy of Universal Studios archive.

Boots and hats.

Cloche hats that would be right at home in 'Downton Abbey.'

Posted by Judy Graeme at 11:20 PM | Permalink

Chalk this up under "didn't see the forest for the trees." Or maybe "didn't see the seaweed for the sand."

The advance screening invitation Tuesday for "The Unsinkable Henry Morgan" at the too-hip Downtown Independent theater was promising. It teased 30 minutes of undersea adventure in the hope of creating buzz for the documentary's premiere on the Sundance Channel this Sunday night.

In 1671, Capt. Henry Morgan's fleet raided the Spanish settlement in Panama and probably burned it down (someone did; unclear who, but such brutal, king-of-the-mountain behavior was typical of Morgan) before karma ran his ships onto Lajas Reef, or some other neighborhood impediment.

Pirates are hot ... sorry, trending ... these days, or they were 10 minutes ago, and who doesn't love a story of pillaging and recovering the spoils of that pastime after 350 years of repose under the Caribbean Sea? We thought we would see tall tales and under-construction truths, learn how a renowned underwater archaeologist found and reclaimed the flagship of Morgan, the privateer representative of the British Empire in all its imperialistic glory, trying to horn in on Spain's New World action.

We thought "The Unsinkable Henry Morgan" would show how Fritz Hanselmann, chief underwater archaeologist at the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University, had found the sunken Satisfaction, as well as a bunch of historical artifacts.

What we saw was "My Dinner with Andre," with less action.

I'm no film critic, but it seems to me when you have all the raw material for a real-life swashbuckler, a history-infused contemporary quest for ships, cannons, swords and who knows what other undersea pirate-y loot, you tell that story. You don't spend 30 minutes filming a costume designer's creation of Morgan's coat, a watercolorist's depiction of a burning Panamanian settlement, a model maker's miniature Satisfaction, a chin-stroking author of a book about Morgan and a couple of travel journalists, all sitting around talking about how lucky they were to get this gig.

These folks are all accomplished members of their professions. But this isn't their story. It's Hanselmann's. Instead of wandering around in search of a storyline, of a way to let the audience down easy--spoiler alert!--when we learn that the divers found an authentic, 17th-century ship, but not one of Morgan's, the film just should have given Hanselmann the tiller.

He's an accomplished reclaimer of underwater historical treasure, and, for crying out loud, he looks like a pirate. He admitted as much during a Q&A at the theater after the screening. Solidly built with longish blond hair and a soul patch, Hanselmann is charming, one of probably few research scientists who can impart the gee-whizzery of a shell-encrusted cutlass in the context of the conservation necessary to preserve it for generations to come. He cares about the environment that is his office as much as the bounty it yields, and he's good at explaining why. He has the coolest job in the world, and we want to watch him do it, and talk about it.

Why the director, Michael Haussman, who also participated in the Q&A with disjointed, confused comments, chose to tell and not show this tale is a damn shame. All storytellers, at some point, struggle with how to relate a drama that ends in a way they don't anticipate. The problem with "The Unsinkable Henry Morgan" isn't that the ship they found wasn't Morgan's, the problem is that the film fails to embrace the journey, and to embrace Hanselmann as our guide.

Captain Morgan Rum, which funded the documentary, has to be disappointed that evidence of Henry Morgan remains sunk in the sand. But it should be even more disappointed that a good story foundered on the shoals of poor conception.

To see a trailer of the film, link here.

Photo: Sundance Channel

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 3:27 PM | Permalink

Last Sunday, the Santa Monica Conservancy celebrated the birthday of Marion Davies at the Annenberg Community Beach House, which is appropriate since the center occupies the spot where William Randolph Hearst and Ms. Davies once shared an opulent Old Hollywood mansion and now shares the site with the remaining pool and a guest house designed by Julia Morgan in 1928.

Given my passion for other properties in the famous couple's real estate portfolio, I really appreciated the guided tours of the Guest House. Conservancy docents, dressed in vintage, assumed the role of a Davies' contemporary in order to share tidbits about the residence and its owners.

We had a swell time in the dining room listening to Joan Crawford discuss Marion's parties.

And Hedda Hopper dished about that infamous cruise with the couple while we stood in the foyer.

Later, there was vintage dancing, toasts and cake. Notables in attendance included Old Hollywood historian Marc Wanamaker and author Ernest Marquez. I even learned that Charles Hood is the 2013 artist in residence at the Davies Guest House. You can read his beach house blog here.

It was a beautiful day to be by the sea. More pics below and on Flickr.

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 4:47 PM | Permalink

I only have a few minutes left before 2012 turns into 2013. I'm observing the folk tradition that you should envision the best moment of the last year in hopes that it will manifest again in the new one.

My best moment of 2012 was visiting with Hutton Wilkinson at his home in Beverly Hills in April. Interior designer, jewelry guru, businessman, socialite, native Angeleno, author, raconteur, and Old Hollywood maven, Hutton Wilkinson is the perfect embodiment of Los Angeles past, present and future.

I'd been aware of him through his role as protégé and business partner of the late artist and interior designer, Tony Duquette, but had never had the opportunity to meet him until a journalist friend invited me along on a visit to Mr. Wilkinson's compound in Beverly Hills, which includes, Dawnridge, Duquette's magnificent house, for an interview about his latest jewelry collection and its accompanying book, Tony Duquette Hutton Wilkinson Jewelry.

Charming, funny, erudite, gracious and kind, Mr. Wilkinson is one of those people who make you feel smart and witty just being in his presence. Wearing a fantastic silk robe from Duquette's personal collection of Asian textiles, he welcomed us as we stepped into Dawnridge's mirrored foyer.

"Ask me more questions, " he commanded as we sipped ice tea in the beyond-baroque living room.

"What kind of jewelry looks best on the jolie laide?" I said.

"Pearls! No, you have to have attitude to wear my jewelry. You need lots of self-confidence. Like Elsie De Wolf, you have to make people see beyond [the plainness of your face]."

Continue reading "Visiting Dawnridge with Hutton Wilkinson" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 6:11 AM | Permalink

New York Magazine's fashion blog The Cut has a Thanksgiving gallery up billed as Twenty-two famous beauties stuffing their faces. Hidden in the series is this gorgeous shot of the original Tail o' the Pup at La Cienega and Beverly boulevards. Eddie Blake was forced to move in 1986 to make way for the Sofitel and landed on San Vicente, where the Pup remained until 2005. The photo is by Douglas Kirkland and Corbis. Sigourney Weaver at the time was between The Year of Living Dangerously and Ghostbusters, and a couple of years from introducing Ellen Ripley in Aliens.

The slide show also has images of a young Elizabeth Taylor eating a hamburger, Katherine Hepburn sharing chowder with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, plus Marilyn Monroe, Tina Turner, Heidi Klum, Twiggy and other faces.

Previously on LA Observed:
What about a Tail o' the Pup truck?
Art o' the Pup
The Pup is gone
Tail o' the Pup next to go

Posted by Editor at 2:15 PM | Permalink

"Surely he hath borne our Griefs, and carried our Sorrows/Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of GOD, and afflicted." - Isaiah LIII, 4

LONDON — I heard the sad news about George McGovern, the former senator and Democratic presidential candidate — age 90, in hospice, said to be "unresponsive" — as I was on my way to the Tate Britain to visit its stunning exhibit on the Pre-Raphaelites, whose unsparing naturalism and often tragic subject matter suddenly suited my newly melancholy mood.

Wandering through the galleries as I glumly reflected on that dainty euphemism, "unresponsive," i.e. comatose — and his daughter Ann's more blunt assessment, that her father was "nearing the end" — I looked up from my reverie and found myself gazing at "The Scapegoat," the extraordinary 1851 work by William Holman Hunt. The biblical quotation above adorns the top of the frame, while below the inscription reads, "And the Goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a Land not inhabited." (Leviticus XVI, 22)

I was utterly transfixed by the power of this painting, whose grim composition offered an almost mystical relevance to my ruminations. Inspired by Hunt's first visit to the Holy Land and his research into Biblical legends, it depicts the hapless goat ritually cast out into the wilderness by the ancient Hebrews, bearing a scarlet cloth on its horns representing the collective sins of the community.

As portrayed by Hunt, a bleaker scene could hardly be imagined. The luckless beast stands in the foreground, mouth agape as it gasps for breath, its doleful eyes rolled heavenward in futile supplication as it totters on faltering legs. Around it, a barren landscape of perfect desolation: the salty flats of the Dead Sea, littered with the skeletal remains of other doomed creatures who perished before.

I'm always wary of resting too heavily on metaphors — as the British humorist Spike Milligan said of cliches, they're like handrails for a crippled mind — but this one was inescapable, and it sent me hurtling back into time 40 years before, when I worked in McGovern's presidential campaign.

As it was for many of us, it was my first foray into politics. Although 18-year-olds had been granted the vote a year before, I was still too young to cast my own ballot. So, fired up by youthful idealism and undisturbed by any intrusion of political reality, I plunged into fevered volunteer work on the McGovern campaign, my 15-year-old brother in tow beside me.

The Vietnam War raged on, despite Nixon's promised "secret plan" to end it, and the draft was still in effect. Rejecting the moderate findings of an obscenity commission originally charted by President Johnson, Nixon threatened a new crackdown on smut, not exactly a top policy priority for a teenage boy with raging hormones. And his "Operation Intercept" program aimed at interdicting cheap Mexican marijuana flowing over the border - well, let's just say any adolescent of that era with a measurable pulse had compelling reasons to prefer McGovern.

That said, I had learned at my father's knee that Tricky Dick represented everything loathsome in postwar American politics. He launched his career in 1946 by Red-baiting FDR liberal Rep. Jerry Voorhees out of his long-held congressional seat, then followed that up by cross-filing in the Democratic primary two years later and obscuring his Republican affiliation so effectively that he defeated the Democratic opponent in his own party primary. Two years later, in 1950, capitalizing on his exploits as an anti-Communist crusader in pursuit of alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss, he defeated incumbent Sen. Helen Gahagan Douglas by attacking her as "pink right down to her underwear." By 1952, Eisenhower plucked him out of the Senate to join the ticket as vice-president. But not everyone who liked Ike also liked Nixon, and explosive revelations of a hidden slush fund from political supporters soon prompted his legendary "Checkers" speech, a desperate but successful effort to save his career. After a failed presidential run in 1960 and in quick succession, the California gubernatorial defeat in 1962 - capped by his embittered blast at the press, "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" - the political establishment pronounced him dead and buried.

Until, that is, a reanimated Nixon rose from the grave in 1968 with what became known as a "Southern strategy" of thinly-veiled racial messaging coupled with pandering to fears of urban unrest and vows to restore law and order. By 1972, the Nixon campaign - "Four More Years," "Now More Than Ever" - was rolling in lobbyist cash, run by a sinister cabal of lackeys heading up a campaign operation called The Committee to Re-Elect the President (aptly known as CREEP), while in the background lurked a mysterious unsolved burglary hinting at even darker misdeeds yet to be revealed.

In short, Nixon to us was The Fiend Incarnate. And imbued with youthful idealism and base adolescent self-interest, we eagerly enlisted in what cynics mockingly dismissed as McGovern's "children's crusade."

We did it all, from cold-calling potential donors to writing them personal thank-you notes. We set up for events, greeted walk-ins, canvassed precincts, handed out door-hangers, put up lawn signs. We stuffed envelopes and leafleted factory gates. We met visiting pols who'd agreed to host local fundraisers, including then-state Sen. George Moscone, later to be elected - and murdered - as mayor of San Francisco. Once, we even crashed a Nixon homecoming rally at the Ontario Airport, talking our way in and getting as close as we could to the candidate's podium before proudly stripping off our jackets to flaunt our McGovern for President T-shirts. How we avoided getting pummeled by the crowd or roughed-up by security I'll never know.

Heading into the final stretch, we dialed names off mimeographed lists to get out the vote, and even drove people to the polls on Election Day (for a kid with a license less than a year, the liability today would be unimaginable.) Oblivious to the polls, we knew that somehow good would triumph.

And so, on election night, we were stunned - and crushed - when McGovern was buried by a 49-state landslide in which he lost even his own state of South Dakota.

He broke our hearts, and as the song says, the first cut is the deepest. But where some turned away in disgust and disillusionment, I found a new sense of engagement and empowerment. Yes, we lost. But we did something that mattered: We believed. We participated. We acted.

And not long after, when the Watergate scandal exploded and the foulness of Nixon's "White House horrors" was finally revealed to the world, we felt we had finally been vindicated.

McGovern, however, never recovered. His campaign was — is — viewed by party regulars as the low-point in modern Democratic politics, emblematic of everything wrong with the nomination and vetting process, a casualty of naive amateurs and interlopers, the very apotheosis of far-left, unelectable self-destructive kookery.

Forty years down the road, there's a lot I wish he would have done differently. His foreign policy isolationism looks more like modern Republicanism than the FDR global engagement I prefer. His cavalier and irresponsible VP selection of Sen. Thomas Eagleton rivals that of Sarah Palin. He made it almost a point of pride to alienate the core constituencies any Democrat needs to win. And ultimately, he just had no clue what he was up against, which raises real questions about what might have followed as President.

As I said, metaphors can be over-extended. But George McGovern never deserved to become the lonely scapegoat for the entire Democratic Party's failure of imagination, of principle, of nerve, and ultimately of competence.

He was an honorable, decent, idealistic and conscientious politician. Now he is dying, abandoned and alone in the political wilderness. With his passing, it's long past time for Democrats to lift the burden of all the sin and iniquity they have inflicted on his reputation and show him the respect and affection he surely has earned.

Editor's update: McGovern died early Sunday morning, Oct. 21, under hospice care in South Dakota. He was 90 years old.

Posted by Joel Bellman at 12:30 PM | Permalink

When Arnon Goldfinger's 98-year-old grandmother Gerda passed away, the Israeli filmmaker and teacher set out to make a short film about her flat in Tel Aviv. He remembered it from his childhood as a place where Germany was very present. Although they had emigrated from Germany to Israel in the 30's before World War II was fully raging, his grandmother and grandfather never assimilated into Israeli culture. Their books, spoken language, furniture and clothing remained as it was in Germany, simply transported to another city. In order to process her passing and say goodbye to her, Goldfinger set out to see what he could learn about her from the things she left behind. He thought about what he had always told his students: In your work, you must do something that is meaningful to your life. And the most meaningful work is that which you really do just for yourself. But he hoped that perhaps what was meaningful to him would also be meaningful to others.

So, he brought his camera crew to his grandmother's flat and filmed everything as he and his family unearthed her treasures, her ephemera, and eventually, her secrets.

Although his grandparent's story is a very individual one it brings up issues that we all deal with in our lives, from the mundane--what do we save and what do we throw away—to the very emotional--what do we share with our family, what do we talk about and what do we hide?

"The film is talking about very basic things," Goldfinger said recently as he passed through Los Angeles to discuss it. "Friendship, longing for the motherland and our connection to our past." He talked about how the second generation of Holocaust era survivors rarely asked questions, for fear of bringing up painful memories. It was easier for the third generation, a bit removed, to ask the tough questions about a painful past. But in talking to audiences at his screenings, he discovered that many children of all backgrounds know little of their family's history.

Goldfinger's film is really about two families, his grandparents and a family in Germany to whom they remained connected during and after the war. In a probing, yet sensitive way, Goldfinger peeled back the layers of their history and discovered some troubling surprises. He knew he could never have asked his grandmother the questions he tried to answer after her death.

But in making this journey to unravel a tangled web of secrets, "I feel much closer to them now," he says of his grandparents. "They became much more human. I felt compassion and sometimes anger. I feel I know them better but that knowing is connected to emotions. When I learned what she was hiding, I was astonished. But people are very complicated. Not everything is in your control."

For many of the German Jews who emigrated to Israel, their connection to their past and to their adopted country was fraught with many conflicting feelings. "When the State of Israel was started, the pioneers and leaders wanted to make a new nation--fresh, brave, strong, with no connections to the Diaspora, to weakness. Of course, it was an illusion," he said. "No one can live without the past."

"The Flat," Goldfinger's exploration of his family's complicated and very unique history, is haunting, thought-provoking and universally human. It opens at the Landmark Theatres on October 24.

Photo of Goldfinger: Iris Schneider. Photo of Gerda and Kurt Tuchler © Goldfinger / Tuchler Family Archive.

Posted by Iris Schneider at 12:21 PM | Permalink

In early October, WeHoville.com contributor Kaitlin Parker posted a lovely history of the Garden of Allah hotel/apartment complex in slide show format, featuring an underground tour of the site in its current incarnation as a mini mall at Crescent Heights and Sunset. Ulisses Acosta, the site's current property manager, even revealed tiles and tunnels that may date back to the hotel's original foundation.
One of the few people who might know for sure is author Martin Turnbull, who has devoted himself to tracking down bits of Garden of Allah hotel lore and integrating them into his fictional series about the famed residential hotel through the decades.

On Saturday, October 20th at 1 PM, Martin will join the LA Chapter of The Dorothy Parker Society at Greenblatt's Deli to discuss his research and latest Garden of Allah novel, The Trouble with Scarlett, featuring Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley who both lived in the hotel its Golden Age in the '30s.

Martin may even have an update on the status of the historical, original scale model of the complex that's still up for auction.

Join us on Saturday. We'll be on the second floor of Greenblatt's Deli at 1 for a no-host lunch.

Historic Garden of Allah photos from Marc Wanamaker and the Bison Archives.

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 2:42 PM | Permalink

There ought to be a complicated, untranslatable German word for the feeling one gets upon recognizing one's everyday landscape in the background of old films or television shows. Is it a twinge of recognition or a thrilling ache?

Let's just call this feeling wiedererkennungsgänsehaut. All I know is that the emotion makes me feel immortal.

Whatever we call it, every Californian knows this feeling -- or should -- since on-location filming is a fact of life in this area.

John Bengtson, an author, film historian and attorney based in the Bay Area, is one of the rare people who acted upon his sense of wiedererkennungsgänsehaut after recognizing a San Francisco location in a Buster Keaton film, "Day Dreams" (1922).

Now, John tracks down the actual historical settings preserved in the background of silent film classics. He has published his discoveries in a series of books: Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood through the Films of Buster Keaton; Silent Traces: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Charlie Chaplin; and Silent Visions: Discovering Early Hollywood and New York Through the Films of Harold Lloyd.

John is coming to Los Angeles this Saturday in order to present a lecture called "Silent Footsteps" at the Central Library on Saturday, September 15 at 2 PM.

Using local archive and map resources, including photos from the library's photo collection, he will take attendees on a virtual tour of the lost neighborhoods of Bunker Hill, Court Hill, as well as the downtown Los Angeles Historic Core, as documented in the films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd.

John agreed to answer a few questions below but will have more to say about the photo collection of the LAPL this Saturday:

What location have you yet to identify? What's left on your 'get' list?

My top "lost" location is the apartment building Harold Lloyd's roommate climbs in order to escape the police at the beginning of "Safety Last!" (1923). Watching his "human fly" friend scale the building gives Harold the idea to use his friend's climbing skills for a publicity stunt, and sets the entire movie in play. There is a decent chance the building is still standing.

What makes it my top location is that there are so many clues visible during the scene that I "ought" to be able to figure it out, but can't. It stands on a street facing a trolley line, beside a narrow alley, and adjacent to a building that has "California Garage" painted on the side.

I will be showing several locations from "Safety Last!" during my talk.

Continue reading "Silent sites unseen: interview with John Bengtson" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 9:02 PM | Permalink

The Ramones at Eric's Club, Liverpool, England, May 1977. Courtesy of Ian Dickson / www.late20thcenturyboy.com

If the question is "Who Shot Rock and Roll," the answer according to the new show at the Annenberg Space for Photography would have to be everybody.

The show is a rambling exhibition of 166 images, some iconic and many obscure, documenting rock and roll and and along with it a slice of cultural history. Most photographers have only a single image displayed, including Annie Liebovitz — whose early unrehearsed black and white images for Rolling Stone are so different than the posed portraits she is more well-known for — and some such as LA's own Ann Summa, who documented the early punk rockers, are ignored. The show marks the first time that the Annenberg Space for Photography has collaborated with a museum, taking a show curated by Gail Buckland that began at the Brooklyn Museum and adapting its space to fit the show.

With so many photographs plastering the walls, the exhibit is as overstimulating as a concert whose speakers are turned up to 11. But a very fine film made to accompany the show features 8 photographers — Bob Gruen, Norman Seeff, Lynn Goldsmith, Henry Diltz, Guy Webster, Mark Seliger, Jill Furmanovsky and Edward Colver — and helps to distill the experience down to something manageable, enjoyable and educational.

I have found some of the shows at the Annenberg too overwhelming, with images hanging up and down the walls, impossible to physically see unless you are Kobe Bryant, and difficult to process because there are just too many images competing for your attention. But for me, the films always come to the rescue, allowing you to sit and take in the experience from a different perspective, then attack the images again.

In this exhibit's film, created by Arclight Productions, photographers whose iconic images are seared into our memories — Norman Seeff's vibrant and sexy Tina Turner, the innocence of Joni Mitchell captured by Henry Diltz, Bob Gruen's John Lennon touting New York City, Colver's raw punk energy — reminisce and tell stories out of school. I learned that Guy Webster's famous Mama's and Papa's album cover photograph of all four of the bandmembers in a bathtub happened because everyone, including the photographer, was too stoned to leave the house. Often the photographers developed friendships with their subjects first, and photography came afterwards. Some, like Diltz with the Lovin' Spoonful, were invited to hop on the bus and tour with the band as their first professional gig.

"So many people say, 'Oh, this was my life,'" Diltz said at the show's opening. As the only official photographer at Woodstock, Diltz's images provide a history of rock that marked milestones for a generation, most of whom remember not only the songs but where they were when they heard them, and what they went through to hear them live. Diltz lived in Laurel Canyon during that golden time when Joni Mitchell, Mama Cass and so many other folk icons hung out together in their backyards, making music and mayhem, and then rolled down the hill to play the Troubador or watch their friends perform on Sunset Strip.

Diltz had been a musician, singing harmonies in a folk group that toured the college circuit. He picked up an old camera on a whim at a flea market while on tour and was blown away when he did his first slideshow for his friends. Totally self-taught ("I learned by reading the directions on the yellow box of Kodak film") he got special access because he was a friend first, photographer second. "It was all by accident," he said.

Left: Tupac Shakur, August 1993 - Courtesy of Danny Clinch; Elvis Whispers Softly, 1956 - © Alfred Wertheimer, The Wertheimer Collection

Indeed, many of the photographers represented in the show started out by touring with a band, gaining the access that made those special and unique images possible simply by being there, camera in hand. It was a much more innocent time. The bands were new themselves, not worried about controlling their image like they are today. There were no restrictions or rules. No limits on what could and could not be shot. They were too involved with having a good time to worry about being in control.

Diltz said that many times he would sit for hours and not shoot a thing. "I learned an important skill as a musician on tour myself. The art of just hanging out."

As these photographs and stories have shown, it paid off.

The show has proven to be extremely popular, and the Annenberg has extended its hours to accommodate the crowds. Indeed, I stopped by on a Saturday night close to the 9 pm closing time and the place was packed. Besides those milling around looking at photos, about 50 people were seated in the area usually reserved for film watchers, totally mesmerized by slides of album covers flashing on huge screens because it was too late to begin a screening of the film.

People connect with these images not only because of what they are, but because of what they mean to them, what memories they trigger, what part they played in the history of their own lives. Music accompanied us along our path in life, whether it was the music we danced to in the 60's or rebelled with in the 80's. For whatever the show lacks in focus, it does provide an opportunity to appreciate some great photography on a communal head trip into our past.

The Annenberg always schedules a series of lectures during their exhibits which are usually sold out immediately and this time they have also added three live, free concerts hosted by KCRW. Despite my reservations about the overkill of imagery, I have to acknowledge the Annenberg Space for its efforts to make photography hip, and accessible to new audiences.

Edited post

Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present is at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City through Oct. 7. Info

Color photo by Iris Schneider

Posted by Iris Schneider at 4:40 PM | Permalink

It's Oscar weekend and the entertainment industry's one hundredth year in Hollywood. Is it just a lucky accident that two front-running Academy Award nominees for Best Picture --"The Artist" and "Hugo" --celebrate important moments in film history? Not only do these films recreate famous moments in cinematic development but also highlight the beauty of movie birthplaces. Who can resist the joys of Paris as seen through the eyes of Hugo Cabret and Martin Scorsese? And "The Artist" pays homage to the silent film era by recapturing film locations in our area relevant to the time period.

So in honor of Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony, I bring you an interview with a Hollywood expert: a tour guide. Philip Mershon is a researcher of Old Hollywood history who shares his love of Hollywood on his blog, Felix in Hollywood. Philip also conducts walking tours of the old studio district surrounding Sunset and Vine in Hollywood. Flavorpill.com labeled his "In A Place Called Hollywood: A Stroll Through The First 100 Years Of Tinseltown" tour "a city gem".

I took the tour earlier this month and enjoyed the way Philip shared his vast knowledge about early Hollywood with wit and affection. Afterwards, I sent him some follow up questions via email.

What did you think of the film The Artist--it seems to have captured many Old Hollywood locations from the silent era.
I really enjoyed "The Artist", though I don't consider it a 'sweep the Oscars' kind of movie like some people do. I suppose that's because I've watched plenty of for-real silent movies and know how brilliant they can be. Watch "Piccadilly" or "Sunrise" for sheer atmospheric other-worldliness, and "The Patsy" or "Exit Smiling" for hilarious comedy and you'll see what I mean. I am, however both delighted and grateful that the "The Artist" was made, made so well, and has found a wide-release audience. Bravo!!! Now if we could just get more American productions to shoot in Los Angeles like this French company did.....

What's your favorite film and why?
Oh no you don't! You're not gonna do a "Sophie's Choice" on me! Someday, over several pots of coffee, we can talk about my 40 or 70 or 100 favorite films, but it's simply impossible to reduce it down to one. For instance the 4 silent titles I mentioned above would probably be on the list but so would a whole bunch of pre-coders, a ton of 30s musicals and gangster pictures, several serials, gobs of noirs, a few surf pictures and - as much as I hate to admit it - even a some modern-era films. An example of that would be: I could watch "The Last Emperor" on a loop for the rest of my life!

What's your favorite stop on your walking tour and why?
[Though it's impossible to answer that question accurately,] I will tell you my favorite part of giving the tour. Not long after I started, I discovered a very unexpected aspect of the tour that people were experiencing. They think that they are just buying a ticket to journey through the history of Hollywood, but then in the middle of talking about movies that maybe their parents or grandparents introduced them to, or TV shows that they watched as children (many of which were old re-runs to begin with), or hit songs that sound tracked the seminal moments of their lives, they realize they are taking a very personal journey as well. These little "entertainments" were quite foundational in all of our personal developments, and I love being able to give that to my guests. It's why giving this tour will never get old for me.

Give me one Old Hollywood anecdote
The private office of Columbia Pictures President Harry Cohn was about as easy to get to as Fort Knox. First, of course, you had to get through the front gate of the studio lot. This was no easier a feat back then than it is now.

After which you would locate and enter the Administration Building. Up on the second floor you would walk into what could be considered the President's Suite. That first room was a large and busy reception area where you would announce yourself to the girl at the desk. Phone calls would then be made, intercoms would be buzzed and those that were deemed admissible would be ushered into the next office, Mr. Cohn's Personal Secretary.

At this point you would want to have a seat because regardless of whether you were on time or early for your appointment, there was going to be a wait. No one could tell you for how long - that was up to Harry. Could be 10 minutes, could be 2 hours. Now don't get too comfortable in that chair because you see there is no knob on the door you will use to enter the Holy of Holies. It is unlocked by a buzzer on Harry's desk that he will depress, when ready, for only about a second. And if you miss pushing that door open during that second-long duration and force him to push it again, well, let's just say I feel sorry for you when you get inside! Glenn Ford said there was an area of the door at about chest height where the paint was eaten away from all the sweaty palms that pushed it open.

Why is your site/tour called Felix in Hollywood?
I'll give you the shorter version of a long and boring story. Felix is the nickname given me by my best. He experienced this revelation from a Felix The Cat t-shirt I was wearing one day about 15 years ago. He's a pretty persuasive guy and in a short period of time a number of other people started calling me Felix too. "Felix In Hollywood" is the name of a 1923 silent Felix The Cat cartoon that I decided to use as the title of the blog I started in 2009. Due to the popularity of the blog, I decided to carry the magic of Felix into the tour branding as well. Hey, you still awake?

You can chat up Philip at Musso & Franks on April 30th where he will be the "on-site history guy" entertaining guests at the next LAVA Literary Salon- Down These Mean Streets: Raymond Chandler's Underworld .

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 6:02 AM | Permalink

Thursday night marked my what has become mostly a once a year event for me: a trip to a UCLA basketball game. This year, that became more complicated because Pauley Pavilion is being renovated. Nearly all of the sports that require an indoor arena moved over to the Wooden Center, but the men's basketball team went out on a journey that saw them play home games in Ontario, Anaheim, but mostly, at Southern California's least beloved sporting facility, the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena.

Despite the banner on the roof shown above and UCLA markings on the court, the Sports Arena has not been a popular destination for UCLA fans. The game against Stanford on Thursday drew just over 5000 fans. (Capacity for basketball is around 16,000, although figures vary from sources I checked.) The Bruins didn't help matters by losing their first two games at the Sports Arena to Loyola Marymount and Middle Tennessee State.

Sitting at the southeast corner of Exposition Park, the Sports Arena, with its distinct lack of frills, was a state of the art arena for a little over five years before pro teams in the area started to look at ways to get out of there. The Coliseum Commission, which operates the Sports Arena, has started to look at other uses for the space, but no plans have been set. And the Sports Arena still stands.

Continue reading "The unused, unloved, and unmoving Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena" »

Posted by Bob Timmermann at 8:08 PM | Permalink

There might be 8 million stories in the naked city, but there are more than 312 million in the United States. StoryCorps wants to hear all of them.

Radio documentarian David Isay (is there a better name for a guy whose job is producing oral histories?) and a host of individual and foundation supporters have built StoryCorps into a Library of Congress archive and a grass-roots movement to get Americans talking to each other. StoryCorps spreads the word--its mission and your recorded stories--with the help of NPR, which airs excerpts of conversations participants have given permission to share.

Through a handful of permanent recording booths throughout the country and a mobile studio housed in an Airstream trailer, people memorialize pieces of a life with the help of trained facilitators. Angelenos are telling tales at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until Dec. 18, the latest of several such L.A. visits since going mobile in 2003. Local NPR affiliate KCRW is airing bits of these oral histories Monday and Wednesday afternoons.

Continue reading "Adventures in storytelling" »

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 4:46 PM | Permalink

Friday, November 4, 2011

• Dick Howard and Martín Plot discuss "Democracy in America" as part of the new West Hollywood Lecture Series curated in partnership with CalArts at the West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers, starts at 7 PM
• "Antiquity in the Twentieth Century: Modern Art and the Classical Vision" symposium starts at the Getty Villa and continues to Saturday. 10:30-5 PM
• Los Angeles Transportation Club hosts its 88th Annual Installation Dinner at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach.
• Lupus LA hosts its Ninth Annual Hollywood Bag Ladies Luncheon at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
• La Luz de Jesus Gallery 25th Anniversary Celebration Part 11 with Mark Mothersbaugh, Mark Ryden, and many, many others. 8 PM
• Designer Alber Elbaz visits Lavin Store in Beverly Hills tonight.
• Night & the City: LA Noir in Poetry, Fiction, & Film events at Beyond Baroque: Raymond Chandler and his Los Angeles Legacy at 7:30 PM and A Night with James Ellroy, live and in person, at 9:30 PM. Venice

• SNL's Molly Shannon signs new book, Tilly the Trickster, at Barnes & Noble at the Grove. 1 PM
• Los Angeles Police Foundation hosts its True Blue Gala at L.A. Live.
• American Indian Arts Market at Autry National Center 10 AM -5 PM.
• Friends of the Los Angeles River benefit hosted by the LA Weekly at its LA 101 Music Festival at the Gibson Ampitheatre, Universal City.
• Leslie Klinger discusses Before Dracula: History of Vampire Literature at Brentwood Branch Library. 2PM
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art honors John Baldessari and Clint Eastwood at its inaugural Art and Film Gala.
• Seth Rogen, Adam Arkin and others host Exceptional Children's Foundation's Fourth Annual Art Sale Fundraiser at Downtown Art Center Gallery. Los Angeles. 6 PM

Continue reading "Angeleno Datebook- November 4, 2011" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 2:31 PM | Permalink

Friday, October 28, 2011

• Young Literati 4th Annual Toastbenefit for the Los Angeles Public Library hosted by Shepard Fairey and featuring the talents of Russell Brand, Demetri Martin, Henry Rollins at Richard J. Riordan Central Library, 630 W. Fifth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071. 8 PM
• Zombie Prom starts at 9 PM in the historic Linda Vista Hospital , formerly Sante Fe Railroad Hospital, 610 S. St Louis St, Downtown, continues Sunday.
• Peace Over Violence honors Los Angeles Police Chief at its 40th Annual Humanitarian Awards at the Beverly Hills Hotel. 6 PM.
• Urban Land Institute hosts Night at the Square on 10/27 from 6-8 PM
• Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles throw the The Big Bash! fundraiser at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
• Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) presents "BELGIUM à la carte" at the Hancock Park residence of the Consul General of Belgium 7PM

• ¡Vivan Los Muertos! at The Autry in Griffith Park, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles, CA 90027-1462. 3-9 PM
• Janet Fitch reads at the Hedgebrook LA Alumn Garden Party at the historic Stendahl Galleries in Hollywood Outpost Estates, benefiting Hedgebrook Women's Writer Colony in the Puget Sound.
• First annual Automotive Authors Book Signing featuring Matt Stone, Steve Lehto, & Phil Noyes at Petersen Museum, 6060 Wilshire Blvd, Miracle Mile. 2-5 PM
• Night & the City Lit Bar Crawl with PENUSA. 7 PM h/t Rina Rubinstein's Culture Alert newsletter: CultureAlert@hotmail.com
• Cedars-Sinai Medical Center hosts the Women's Guild Annual Gala at the Kodak Theatre.
• Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles hosts Girltopia: The World of Girl Live at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Run for cover from the Girlzillas running amok Downtown at the sold out event.

Continue reading "Angeleno Datebook- October 28, 2011" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 6:37 PM | Permalink

Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) devotes a week to the work of Joan Didion, who has just released another memoir, called Blue Nights. Meghan Daum, Susan Straight, Amy Wilentz, Richard Rayner, Amy Ephron, and today, Matthew Specktor, who grew up around the corner when Didion lived in Brentwood, contribute essays contemplating the author and her place in the L.A. literary landscape.

The upstart literary review now comes in e-book format via Kindle. And on Thursday, November 3, Live Talks Los Angeles hosts a benefit for the LARB in the form of a conversation between the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik and filmmaker Ed Zwick.

Can't get enough of La Didion? Catch "An Evening with Joan Didion" at Vibiana on Nov. 16 through the ALOUD lectures program.

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 1:19 PM | Permalink

Thursday, October 2011

• Celebrity Chef Tour fundraiser for the James Beard Foundation, featuring the cooking of Iron Chef Marc Forgione and family at Chaya Brasserie, West Hollywood, 7:30 PM. h/t Eater LA
• Outfest Legacy Project honors Adam Shankman at its Legacy Awards 2011 at the Directors Guild of America. 8 PM
• Eric Olsen, Glenn Schaeffer, & Michelle Huneven discuss and sign We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at Book Soup at 7 PM.
• Boys & Girls Clubs of America honors Earvin "Magic" Johnson at its Heroes & High Hopes Award at the Ritz-Carlton, Los Angeles at L.A. Live.
• Bonnie Nadzam will read and sign her debut novel, Lamb, at Skylight Books at 7:30 PM

• LA Fashion Week starts today at the Sunset Gower Studios.
• Thad Nodine will read and sign his debut novel, Touch and Go, and Andrea Portes will read her novel, Hick, at Skylight Books, starting at 7:30 PM
• GLSEN-Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network honors Chaz Bono and Rob Reiner at its Seventh Annual Respect Awards at the Beverly Hills Hotel. 5:30 PM

Continue reading "Angeleno Datebook- October 20, 2011" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 1:34 PM | Permalink

Friday, October 14, 2011

• Congresswoman Karen Bass discusses Obama's Job Package at the Urban Issues Breakfast Forum of Greater Los Angeles in the North Campus,Crystal Ballroom of the West Angeles Church of God In Christ, 3045 Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles, CA. 7:30 AM
• William Shatner signs his release of his new space-themed concept album, "Seeking Major Tom." at Amoeba Music in Hollywood. 7 PM
• American Cinematheque honors Robert Downey, Jr. at its 25th Annual Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Starts at 6:30 PM
• ArtNight starts in Pasadena at 6 PM

Continue reading "Angeleno Datebook- October 14, 2011" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 2:24 PM | Permalink

Thursday, October 6, 2011

• PEN USA and The Paris Review host a party featuring insights from Ann Louise Bardach, David Kipen, Jonathan Lethem, Tom Lutz, Mona Simpson, and Michael Tolkin in the Cactus Lounge of the Standard Hotel. 7:30-10 PM
• The Drucker Business Forum hosts Deputy Mayor Austin Beutner for a look at "Keeping LA Competitive in the Global Economy" at Crawford Family Forum, 474 S Raymond Ave, 3 PM
• LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne discusses cars, freeways, & getting around LA as part of a series on "Transportation & Living Streets" at Occidental College
• Documentarian Aron Ramen screens his documentary "Pwer & Control: LSD In the 60's" at Beyond Baroque , 681 Venice Blvd, Venice 5 PM
• LA artists Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston & Betye Saar reminisce at Natural History Museum as part of Pacific Standard Time. Natural History Museum, 900 Exposition Blvd
• Aloud presents criminologist David M Kennedy in conversation with LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck at 7 PM.Taper Auditorium, LA Central Public Library, Downtown LA
• "The Hollywood Librarian" documentary screens at CSULA, U-SU Theatre, Cal State Univ, 5151 State University Dr, LA. 6 PM
• Harry Gamboa, Jr. & Willie Herrón lead a tour of the exhibition "Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972-1987" at 7 PM at LA County Museum of Art

• Art Opening and memorial for late Looney Tunes animator, Corny Cole, at the Animation Guild Local,1105 N Hollywood Way in Burbank. 6 PM
• 3 nights of Burlesque, Erotic Plays & Hot Music at Theater of Note, runs thru Sunday. Friday night event starts at 8 PM.
• World Festival of Sacred Music starts at Art of Living Center, 948 W Adams Blvd, West Adams
• Judge Glenda Hatchett discusses her book Dare to Take Charge: How to Live Your Life on Purpose at Eso Won Books. 7 PM

  by /ul>

  Continue reading "Angeleno Datebook- October 6, 2011" »

  Posted by Adrienne Crew at 6:54 PM | Permalink

Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 -- that Getty-supported initiative documenting the origins of the area's contemporary art scene currently on display at various cultural institutions across the Southland -- provides Angelenos with unprecedented opportunities to peep into hitherto hidden private collections and galleries all over town. One such treasure is the Stendahl Galleries in the Hollywood Hills. It is the legacy of legendary art dealer, Earl Stendahl, who played an important role in incubating a market for Modern art in Southern California in the early 20th century.

Continue reading "Q&A: April Dammann on Earl Stendahl and the early LA art scene" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 8:49 PM | Permalink

The Plaza, Los Angeles, circa 1880 by Carleton Watkins / J. Paul Getty Museum

Carleton Watkins, whose images of 19th-century California are the stars of an exhibition at the Getty Museum, had a simple motto: to stand "where the view looks best." Weston Naef, the Getty's senior photography curator, calls Watkins "the greatest American photographer before Alfred Stieglitz....He was an artist in the very strictest sense of the word. He was probably the first American to show a purely photographic imagination — as opposed to a painterly imagination...."

For Naef, the exhibit represents decades of admiration for his subject. Watkins was probably the first to photograph Yosemite and his astounding images of the valley and the Mariposa Grove of big trees propelled the first federal protection of the Sierra Nevada wilderness.

Born in 1829 in Oneonta, New York, Watkins arrived in San Francisco in 1850 and was hired by childhood friend Collis P. Huntington (who later founded the Central Pacific Railroad) to deliver supplies to Gold Rush mines. After fire consumed Huntington's enterprise, Watkins worked as a carpenter and bookseller and began taking scenic daguerreotypes of the Mother Lode country. He moved to San Francisco and photographed the estates of the city's wealthy, making important contacts through Huntington and at social occasions in the home of Jessie Benton Fr�mont, writer and activist wife of the former U.S. Senator and general John C. Fr�mont.

Watkins accepted commissions to provide photos for court cases and clients such as the State Geological Survey, but it's his personal projects that display his abundant spirit of exploration. Watkins reached Yosemite via the Mariposa Trail for the first time in 1858-59 and returned many times. He had a San Francisco cabinet maker create a camera capable of accommodating glass plates as large as 18 inches by 22 inches. The amazingly detailed photographs made with the unique "mammoth plate" camera brought Watkins international renown. He used an enclosed wagon to transport hundreds of pounds of camera equipment, glass and chemicals needed to develop his glass plate negatives, sometimes pulled by mules and sometimes loaded on a rail flatcar. He traveled hard miles around California and the Farallon Islands off San Francisco, and ventured afar to destinations such as Yellowstone, Puget Sound, South America and the Arizona Territory outpost of Tombstone.

Watkins produced more than 1,100 mammoth-plate photographs, making him one of the 19th century's most prolific photographers. Some of his best-known images are panorama views of San Francisco in the 1860s and rare images of the crumbling California missions. He traveled by rail to southern California for the first time in 1876-77 and again in 1880-81 to photograph the burgeoning oil industry, agriculture, and other subjects.

Thompson's Seedless Grapes, Kern County 1880 by Carleton Watkins / J. Paul Getty Museum

The Los Angeles that Watkins visited would have seemed like a wild west boomtown (and part Mexican pueblo.) It was far from most evidence of civilization. H.H. Bancroft in "Bancroft's Guide For Travelers by Railway, Stage, and Steam Navigation" called Los Angeles:

The oldest and largest city of Southern California, having 5,614 inhabitants, many of whom are foreigners. It is situated in a narrow valley, about 22 miles from the sea, on the Los Angeles River. The city is rapidly growing in population and wealth, and the surrounding country abounds with extensive and flourishing vineyards, groves of oranges, lemons, olives, and other tropical fruits. Connected with San Francisco by steamer and railroad, via San Pedro�

In Los Angeles, Watkins continued to associate with influential people like Don Benito Wilson, a rancho owner and former mayor. Watkins, according to Naef, had an "ingrained sense of history" and made a point of photographing the historic plaza where Los Angeles was founded. It's not by accident that the stereograph contains elements that are symbols of the city's origins, including the old plaza church ( Our Lady the Queen of the Angels), Fort Moore Hill and the adobe home of former Californio leader Andres Pico. It's conceivable that Watkins would have encountered Pio Pico, California's last Mexican governor, sunning himself on the plaza.

Watkins' record of the state's historic Franciscan missions took him all over California, starting with Mission Dolores in San Francisco. His photograph of Mission San Fernando, Rey de España, is in the Getty show. While here he also photographed the beach in Santa Monica, locales in the San Gabriel Valley and Point Fermin lighthouse.

Beach and Bathing House at Santa Monica, 1880 by Carleton Watkins / J. Paul Getty Museum

Though he achieved international fame and commercial and artistic success, Watkins' endured financial distress when his sight began to fail. In 1895-6 he lived with his wife and children in an abandoned railroad car, until Huntington deeded him a ranch in rural Yolo County. In the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, Watkins lost all of his glass-plate negatives, business records, archives, and personal papers. In 1910 he was committed to Napa State Hospital for the Insane. He died in poverty in 1916 and was buried in an unmarked grave. It was a tragic end for the artist who, according to the Getty, played a "dominant role in establishing an outdoor photographic tradition in California."

Says Naef, "his photographs were as perceptive as the words of a poet and they provide a unique personal vision of the birth and growth of California."

Dialogue Among Giants: Carleton Watkins runs at the Getty until March 1, 2009.

Posted by Judy Graeme at 11:26 PM | Permalink